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Boletín de noticias

Richard Drummond / Linux Format (UK)

February 2002

Boot Manager. OS Selector 5.0 Deluxe

Need to dual boot Linux and Solaris or keep three versions of Windows on the hard drive? Richard Drummond seeks peaceful cohabitation.

Today we have more choice than ever before over what operating systems we run on our PCs. There are half a dozen versions of Windows to choose from, there's Linux, various flavours of *BSD, OS/2, BeOS, AtheOS, the list goes on. The down side of all this choice occurs when — as most of us do — you want two or more of these disparate OS's to cohabit peacefully on one machine. Acronis think they have the answer with their OS Selector.

OS Selector is a combined boot manager and partition manager. It installs a boot menu program to the boot block of your first hard drive, allowing you to select which operating system you want to load. Nothing unusual there. OS Selector is more than just a clone of LILO or GRUB, thought. From the boot manager, and so configure which OS's are available in the menu, or the partition manager — which lets you edit, create, delete, move and resize disk partitions.

Installing OS Selector is simple, since it shipped on a bootable CD-ROM. Load up from this and OS Selector duly gets installed. Like most non-trivial boot manager's OS Selector is too large to live on the MBR of your boot disk alone. The balance of the program is installed into a FAT partition. This means that you must have at least one FAT partition on your machine to be able to use OS Selector — which seems a rather arbitrary restriction. If you don't have a FAT partition going spare, the installer can automatically try and find some free space, or resize a partition to make some, and create a small FAT partition for the installation.

By default OS Selector presents you with a swish mouse-driven, graphical interface. Everything has keyboard shortcuts — for rodent-free machines — and you can fall back on a text-only VGA mode if you really want. Context-sensitive help is available at all times, and this should be a real boon for newcomers — despite the poor proof-reading in places.

The boot manager lets you create, edit, add and delete boot contexts. A boot context is a collection of settings intended to boot a particular operating system installed in a specified partition in a particular way and each is associated with a boot menu entry. Each entry can have a description, an icon and may be password protected.

Through the window

In the case of Windows operating system, each context can manage its own system files — such as config.sys, autoexec.bat, etc — and with this mechanism, OS Selector lets you install multiple Windows operating systems in separate folders on a single partition. This is made easier by a special Windows 95 / 98 / ME install wizard which can be used to prepare your system when doing a new install of one of these systems. Also useful for wrestling with Windows, each context can have its own active and hidden partitions lists. This lets you overcome Windows insistence on being installed on the first partition of the first disk.

When you first install OS Selector, it will automatically detect any bootable Windows partitions and create default boot context for them. It can also spot partitions with LILO installed on the boot sector and so create default Linux boot contexts. When you install any new operating system, OS Selector automatically detects the changes in the partition table and tries to update its boot menu accordingly. Operating systems it doesn't recognise will be added as unknown and will have to be configured manually.

OS Selector doesn't know how to boot Linux kernel. It needs and uses LILO or GRUB installed on a partition's boot sector for this. It can detect LILO and so shrewdly guess as to which Linux partitions are bootable, but that's it. This mean that you can't specify kernel versions and parameters in OS Selector boot context — you'll still need to set-up your own boot loader for this. You will have to go through two menus to choose a kernel to boot.

The other half of OS Selector is the partition manger. This presents you with a graphical interface with which you can interactively creates, modify, delete, copy and none-destructively resize FAT, NTFS, ext2, ReiserFS and Linux swap partitions. This is well implemented, fast and easy to use. It also knows how to convert between FAT16 and FAT32 partitions and also includes a handy disk sector editor.

As we said above, OS Selector is not a Linux loader. A corollary of this fact is that, if you use LILO and you move or resize your boot partition, then you won't be able to boot that partition with OS Selector. This is because OS Selector doesn't know how to update LILO's settings to accommodate the new physical location of the kernel image on disk. You'll have to boot from a rescue disk and re-run LILLO to fix this. To be fair though, this isn't a problem isolated to OS Selector. All partition managers face similar issues with LILO.