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How to Boot-up a
Microsoft® Windows™ 2000/XP/2003 OS
install from within an Extended Partition
This
document is Copyright © 2009 by Daniel B. Sedory
NOT to be reproduced in any form without Permission
of the Author !
NOTE:
Although this page is still under development,
Here are some initial thoughts on the subject
which might help some of you:
Introduction
If you're considering dual- or multi-booting a number of OSs on your computer, you should spend time deciding the best course of action before installing any particular OS on a disk; unless you intend for it to be the only OS on that disk. Windows™ operating systems were created without any thought (at best) or to prevent (at worst) users from easily running another company's OS on the same computer. But this state of affairs also resulted in some complaints from Microsoft's loyal consumers when it came time to evaluate new MS-OS versions. In general, if you're going to include an MS-OS on your disk, the older one(s) should be installed first, followed by Windows XP and lastly a well behaved system such as Linux, or possibly a Unix variant such as BSD or even the free basic Mac OSX software; sometimes depending upon the specific distribution(s) involved. NOTE: The Windows Vista OS is difficult to multi-boot because it not only wants to reserve a much larger amount of space at the beginning of a disk, but it also uses different boot loader software than any previous MS-OS. You can read about these issues at: www.multibooters.co.uk
However, some people end up in a situation where they cannot re-install or move an existing OS from their hard disk! Is this your case? If so, it's likely some Linux or Unix OS you do not want to or cannot (for lack of a backup disk) remove; even though you were able to shrink some of the parition(s) to make room for Windows!
I hope you found this Introduction helpful.
The Starman.
Created: January 25, 2009 (2009.01.25).