Non PS-related, but for geeks who like tools and utilities like me. This is going to sound like a commercial, but this was one of those obscure finds that was just so good I feel it's worth sharing.
A while ago I was looking for something to manage the lab machines my development staff uses for testing software, and one of the devs turned me on to BootIT.
BootIT is a multiboot manager, like system commander, but it actually works.
BootIT loads on the hard disk on it's own tiny 18meg partition. Once installed BootIT loads first, then based on your selections rewrites the MBR so that you can boot to any partition you want and have any other partitions hidden or visible to the OS you boot into.
You can have up to 256 PRIMARY partitions on your hard disk, as the MBR limit is bypassed by the fact that BootIT just rewrites the MBR to show any four you choose.
My lab machine currently has 27 different bootable configs, each with a different OS/office combination.
Beyond that, BootIT does complete partition managment, creates, resizes, slides, images and restores, burns an image to cd directly and handles just about every file system, including journalized linux partitions. No problem dual booting linux/xp.
The one utility replaced ghost and partition magic, plus allows you to control your boot process. Ever add an IDE drive to an SCSI NT system? You normally have to mess with NTLoader and boot.ini to get it to work since the system will try to boot from the ide drive first. I've used bootit to do this without having to mess with the exisiting config at all. Just loaded it onto the IDE drive and pointed to the NT system on the SCSI drives.
Sorry if this type of thread annoys anyone, just thought I'd share with my geeky brethren. I like to support small software when it's worth it, and BootIT only runs about $30.
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The Wages of Sin is death, but the hours are good.
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2003-03-14, 04:27 PM
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