Virtual OS/2 International Consumer Education

September 1998

By: Dr. Allie Martin - alliem@wtjam.net

Bluesky Innovation's Power Boot is a great tool for those who use multiple operating systems and especially those who do not install operating systems all at the same time. With it, you can install various operating systems and boot from each in ways that you cannot normally do without the use of Powerboot.

Power Boot is compatible with all operating systems for the PC platform, including our beloved OS/2. It is purely a bootmanager and therefore does not offer other features as the comparable application, System Commander, which costs significantly more. Most of us who use and install multiple operating systems, already use Partition Magic which comes with these additional features anyway.

Hardware Requirements

Installation:

Installation on my fully HPFS formatted first harddisk was very easy and quick. This involved unzipping the archive on a diskette, booting with a DOS diskette, running the install executable on the installation disk and following the simple instructions.

Uninstalling was just as easy, involving the same installation steps but instead, selecting uninstall from the first popup menu.

Features:

It may be run in simple or expert mode and may even be run in quiet mode where you are not presented with a boot menu but instead the copyright statement. The quiet mode can be interrupted readily by pressing the spacebar.

Power Boot's features include:

• The ability to hide/unhide partitions on the fly as you boot up. There is no need to run another program in order to hide or unhide partitions.
  
• A one touch option to configure your system to update an Operating System.
  
• A one touch option to configure your system to install an OEM version of an operating system e.g. Windows95 OSR2. Very often, these OEM versions will not install if they detect another OS on the system.
  
• Giving names to your partitions like 'Win95 OSR2' or 'MSDOS 6.22' for easy identification
  
• The ability to boot from any one of 63 partitions in any drive. This is only limited by the ability of the OS to be booted from a drive other than C.
  
• Once the operating system is loaded, Power Boot does not occupy any memory
  
• Not requiring any configuration. It is INSTALL and PLAY!
  
• Password facilities for security with a save last boot ability.
  

The DOS swap drive allows you to boot an operating system from a disk other than disk one which needs to boot from drive C:, such as DOS/win3.x. It does this by logically swapping the drives so that the operating system to be booted thinks that it is on the first disk and hence on drive C:. If you get a new hard disk you can then install it as the first hard disk and with Power Boot still be able to boot your old DOS installation on your old disk.

The win9x swap drive feature provides the ability to install on and boot win9x from a second, third, or fourth harddisk. This means that you can install a second harddisk leaving OS/2 on your first disk and then going ahead and installing as well as booting win9x from this new disk.

Adding new disks and creating new partitions can unexpectedly change drivelettering making your OS/2 installation unbootable. Hence the use of the OS/2 boot drive letter feature, which allows you to boot OS/2 from a HPFS partition using any driveletter you need to. This overrides the default driveletter allocation.

Verdict:

So, if you find yourself spending a long time planning how you are going to install another OS on your system without one getting in the way of the other, then Power Boot is a great solution.

You can register Power Boot online at BMT Micro - http://www.bmtmicro.com or the OS/2 Super Site - http://www.os2ss.com/
Registration prices:
$25.00 - Single User License
$230.00 - 25 User License
$525.00 - 50 User License

Dr. Allie Martin
An end user of OS/2 Warp 4