building a mult-bootup computer

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kennyF

Member
Hi am new here and I need help.:tongueout:oint: I want to build a multi-boot computer starting with dos-5.0, windows 3.1, windows 95 or 98, maybe both then windows ME, I have a lot of old games I just love to play that just wont work today on my XP or windows 7 I have two old computer 1 with windows xp and other with windows me and a spare dr about 2 gig. I have read about multi-boot with xp.:booyah: But do I reformat the hard dr to 5 partions installing each dos in each section? I think that is what you are to do but don't understand how you get the startup to ask you what dos you want to run and how to get it to run it and if you don't select a dos say in 25 sec. it will run ME as the defult dos. also how big should each partions I know once I put like windows 3-1 on a computer with like a 3or 400 meg HD and it made like 40 or 50 HD cause it coulden't see one HD that big :lup: well I would love any help someone could give me kenny
 
Windows pre-XP didn't come with any native multi-boot capability, and the Windows architecture expects each of those OSs to reside at the front of the boot disk, which they obviously can't all do.
As far as I know, the only way to do what you want is to find a 3rd party boot management app which can manipulate the partition table to make every OS think it exists in isolation.
I don't think there are any freeware apps that will do the job, but a web search should confirm that, and tell you what you'll have to pay to get the software you need, and whether it's worth it to you.
If you've got a few spare old small HDDs on which you can install each OS individually, you could probably set up XP or Vista/7 to multi-boot them for you, but not off one partitioned HDD
 
You could just use a program like DOSBox to play these old games. The old OS's your talking about are nothing more than jsut a User Interface for DOS.
 
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