At 20:41 7/26/99 , David wrote:
 >And many boot managers, probably including System Commander,
 >also need a partition, making FIVE.


Hi David

Actually, System Commander does not need a partition for itself.
(I've been using SC since 1995, upgrading whenever new versions
came out.)

System Commander "lives" in the master boot record. When you boot,
the System Commander MBR loads the rest of the SC program into
memory. (This program resides on a primary FAT partition on the
first disk...in the root directory. I don't count this as SC taking
up a partition by itself because this partition is used by Windows
or DOS...one of the operating systems that can be chosen to run.)

When the SC program is running in memory, it looks at each disk's
partition table and collects information about the available
operating systems and displays a menu. When a choice is made, SC
loads that OS's boot record and marks that OS's partition active.
The OS is launched and SC disappears. At this point, the chosen OS
does not know that SC ever existed in memory.

SC also checks for new operating systems each time it loads and
hides any partitions that are configured to be hidden when the
chosen OS is booted.

Regards,
Bill

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