Partitioning & Multibooting.

[ainwood]

I am getting a new Hard Disk Drive, and want to make it multi-bootable. As a minimum I want DOS an XP on it, but I may even put a win98 partition on, and might leave an unspecified partition in case I ever want to try Linux.

I am trying to work out how I go about doing this... It appears that to do this, I need to create a FAT (16) 'boot' partition, then a system partition of the appropriate format (FAT or NTFS) for each OS that I want to install. Is this correct?

If the above is correct, How big should I make the boot partition? I presume that all this contains is command.com, autoexec.bat, io.sys etc, so is a couple fo MB enough?

I understand that I then need to install MS-DOS first (on its partition), then install WIN XP last. Is that right?


On a related note, to get the CD-ROM and sound to work under MSDOS, I presume I'll have to manually install drivers and configure them via autoexec.bat & config.sys. Does anyone know whether just using generic soundblaster drivers will work with an on-board sound card?

 

[IglooDame]

This should answer your question about multi-booting:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;306559

I would recommend not putting DOS on the hard drive at all, and instead keeping a properly configured floppy available that DOS will boot from.

Regarding the sound card, it has been awhile but I think generic soundblaster drivers will work.