triple boot windows 98 windows 2k and freedos

[soviet9922]

What at first seems like something easy to archive turns to be quite hard to do.
Have this configuration
drive number 2 - partition 1 windows 98se
partition 2 windows 2000

drive number 1 - Freedos 7

now on drive 2 have the windows 2000 boot menu and can boot fine between windows 98 and windows 2000.

If i go to the bios and switch to boot to drive 1 i can boot freedos fine.

Like to add freedos to the windows 2000 boot menu, or maybe other way to have a bootmenu to choose from the 3 operating systems ?.

 

[Chuck(G)]

What are you using for your boot manager?

 

[tofro]

The Windows 2000 Boot Manager is quite limited.

You might want to use an alternative, like Plop, for example. That's what I use, it also hase quite a number of other goodies you might want.

 

[Chuck(G)]

I use Grub on almost all my systems. There are even versions for non-Linuxers. There are tons of other boot managers around.

 

[Agent Orange]

Look for "System Commander"

System Commander - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I've used it for years and highly recommend it.

 

[Chuck(G)]

Another popular one for the DOS/Windows group was the boot manager that accompanied Partition Magic.

 

[tofro]

I like Plop for its ability to boot from USB even if the BIOS of the PC doesn't support that, which can be very useful in places.

 

[Chuck(G)]

Grub can do likewise and even supports booting from image files.

 

[Agent Orange]

Grub can do likewise and even supports booting from image files.

But then you're dealing with you know what.

 

[Chuck(G)]

There is a version called GRUB4DOS/WINGRUB:

GRUB4DOS and WINGRUB

Download GRUB4DOS and WINGRUB for free. GRUB for DOS is the dos extension of GRUB. It enables dos users to run the configuration console directly in real mode.

sourceforge.net

 

[Svenska]

You should be able to extract the boot sector from your FreeDOS partition, save it into a file and add that to the Windows 2000 loader. This is explained for example here. However, I have had great success with the XFDISK boot manager (looks like the OS/2 boot manager, but without using a partition slot).

 

[bakemono]

Yes, you can add it to the Win2k boot menu by editing BOOT.INI. But you'll need a sector editor to get a copy of the FreeDOS boot sector, and if the BIOS has changed the order of the drives then you'll probably also have to patch the copy of boot sector so it uses drive number 0x81 instead of 0x80.