Re: partioning

["J. R. Fox" jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

Mimi Gauthier LeBien wrote:

>
> Could someone kindly recommend a good utility program that
> would make it easier to create separate drives on a hard drive,
> allowing one to make a choice between WIN or DOS at boot up.

Tim is correct. Partition Magic is the leading hard-drive
partitioning utility. It allows you to create, delete, resize,
or move hard drive partitions, as well as do some other things
like change the File System type resident in a partition, Hide a
partition, etc. You may find its' use -- and the basic concepts
behind it -- to be a bit more technical than you had in mind,
depending on your background.

However, PM by itself is not enough: in order to select which
Operating System (bootable partition) to run at boot time, you
need another utility to mediate the choice. I've used System
Commander for that with great success, over the last four years
or so. It requires some setup, but after that it is pretty
straightforward. (A more deluxe version of SC includes their own
competing version of a disk partitioning program. Haven't used
that.) There are several competing commercial or shareware
utilities, which I've heard of but have no direct experience
with. And there are other ways to get the same boot-mediation
result, albeit in a more spartan manner. OS/2 and ECS include a
Boot Manager utility that can boot different operating systems.
NT-4 had something similar, and quite possibly the NT descendants
Win-2000 and XP do also, though you'll have to seek guidance
about that with someone more knowledgeable about the latter two.

Jordan