On 17 Apr 99, at 19:33, Donald E. Gulmire, Jr. wrote:

> Most of the small amount of computer knowledge I've gotten since I began
> tinkering around with them (approx. one year) has come with me
> experimenting with my PC.  I just got a Linux Red Hat 5.2 disk.  I have
> Partition Magic.  It says I can use two op. systems.  Any advise on
> whether I'm getting in over my head.  Also any links I can use to make my
> task easier.

  Normally, when you boot a machine from the hard drive, code in ROMs inside
the PC locates the hard drive partition that is marked "active", reads a
small block of code from that partition, and executes it.  This small block
of code is a "bootstrap loader" that knows how to load the rest of the OS.

  Recent versions of Partition Magic include a licensed copy of a nifty thing
called Boot Manager, originally devleoped as part of IBM's OS/2.  [There are
other products on the market, such as System Commander, which provide similar
functions.  NT and Linux (lilo) also each provide some kind of boot menu
facility that is capable of loading other OSes....]  It installs as a tiny
drive partition, marked so that the ROMs will see *it* as the "active"
partition.  But instead of loading an OS from that partition, the code which
the ROms load turns out to present a menu from which you can choose which
partition to boot from.

  This makes it *possible* to run several different OSes on a single PC, by
installing each to its own boot partition and using Boot Manager to select
amongst them.
  There are a couple of things to watch for.  Different OSes support
different partition formats, so even though they're on the same drive, it may
be difficult/impossible to get at data created under one OS when you've
booted to another.  FAT16 is sort of the "lowest common denominator",
providing the widest support but lacking security and other advanced
features.  [FAT and boot partitions also have placement restrictions which
may limit your ability to use all of a drive bigger than about 4 or 8 GB.]
  There is a limit to four primary partitions on a drive, and I think the
Boot Manager partition, tiny as it is, counts against that limit.  You could
make one an extended partition containing multiple volumes, but I don't think
you can make such a partition bootable, so realistically you're looking at 3
different OS boot partitions tops, and more likely 2.
  Installing multiple OSes ("multi-boot" or, often "dual boot") can be a
convenient way to explore options without buying a lot of extra hardware
[=COST].  My experience is that, for productivity, if you routinely work on
two OSes, you really want at least two machines.

  You'll find that Linux is a very different beast from DOS or Windows.
Whether this is "getting in over your head" or not is not something I can
tell from your message.  It will take time and effort to learn it; you may or
may not have that time and commitment available, and  you may or may not find
that the rewards are worth it *to you*.  I think that if you find they are,
you'll want to have Linux running all the time which may necessitate a second
machine; I think you've chosen a sensible way to find out before spending
that money.
  I don't think Linux questions are off-topic here, but as a realistic matter
you should probably cruise by www.linux.org and learn about other resources
that may be better able to field Linux-specific questions.


David G

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