Hi,
> Win 98, or Linux. I have Partition Magic to make the partitions, and it
> came with Boot Magic, which from the documentation seems to allow for
> choosing the OS I want at boot time. However, someone whose opinion I
> respect suggested System Commander. Does anyone have any experience with
> this situation and if so, what do you recommend?
I don't know System Commander, but I have used Boot Magic (I think in the
version 1.0). I used it as a boot manager on a laptop computer to boot from
DOS 6.22, Win 98, and Windows NT 4.0. The only drawback of Boot Magic which
I found was that when I put the computer into "suspend-to-disk mode" (this
mode is about the same as the "hibernation mode" of modern OSes, but it's
provided on the machine or bios level and not dependent on the OS), the
next time I power it up, it would not wake up from the "suspend-to-disk
mode", but instead display the Boot Magic boot menu. This means that the
state of the machine which was saved when I put it to "sleep" was lost, and
I had to boot "fresh". The technical background of this problem is as
follows:
when the machine is put into "suspend-to-disk mode", the internal state of
the machine (RAM, registers, and stuff) is saved to hard disk, and the next
the machine is turned on, a special boot block is executed instead of the
standard boot block of the usual OS. The secial boot block will restore the
previously saved state of the machine. Unfortunately, Boot Magic got into
the way, bypassing this special boot block completely. The solution whic I
eventually found was: when the Boot Magic boot menu appeared, I did not
select an entry, but switched into some sort of "advanced mode", which
allowed me to view all partions/boot blocks and select the special "suspend-
to-disk" boot block manually. (This explanation is a bit inaccurate, as my
use of this configurations lies a few years in the past, but I guess it's
sufficient to give you an idea what to do if you happen to run into this
problem...).
Hope that helps - usually, when I tell my opinion/experience, the decision
gets harder :-)
Best regards, Klaus
