My Next PC Project?

One of the really cool things about a Mac is that it automatically can search for loaded operating systems and will boot from any it recognizes that are loaded on the machine. (That’s generally any operating system or OS version invented after the Mac was released.) On my G4 PowerMac which has four hard disks in it, I could load up Jaguar on one, Panther on another, and Tiger on a third, load up OS 9.2.2 on a fourth or any of the other three, and then pick which operating system I wanted to boot from. I can do it when the machine boots by holding down the Option key during start-up or by going to System Preferences/Startup Disk and selecting it there after the computer is operating. (Macs can do the same trick using an external Firewire hard drive as well.)

The closest I can come to that on my PC is by using a boot loader, special piece of software that will allow me to load and manage multiple operating systems. I’d really like to be able to boot my PC into Windows XP, Win 98SE, or DOS 6.22 at will. While I can today boot into Windows XP or 98SE, adding DOS 6.22 is another matter.

After searching the web (a valid technique for conducting some research despite the railings of Tom Delay), I found a boot loader called “OSL2000”. The beauty of this boot loader is it will boot from your first or second hard disk. That would allow me to add a second hard disk I could boot from (and move my current data disk to the third hard disk). I would add make the first partition (active) on the 2nd boot disk about 40GB in size, and then make the rest an NTFS partition I could load video footage on.

Why do I want to run DOS 6.22? Old flight simulators that won’t run on 98SE well or XP at all are the reason.

Now, to find a copy of DOS 6.22…. (Ebay, here I come!)