Regarding MBR versus GPT. I have five late model laptops that shipped
as GPT. I have three desktops that are MBR. I have not found GPT to be
the solution to any problem I have. Apparently we can now have all
primary partitions, but the benefit is not obvious to me.
I recall great concern when a new version of Win (probably Win7)
preinstalled with three (or was it four?) primaries which did not leave
a primary for a boot manager so OS/2 could be run also. I never had an
issue. My desktops have FreeDOS, two OS/2 versions, Win XP, and Win 7.
The only primary has FreeDOS and a DOS based boot manager.
Regarding hiding Win and DOS from each other. My first PC-AT clone had
a 28Mb, dual height HDD. I broke it into three partitions. A few
months later my second PC-AT clone had a 100Mb, single height HDD. I
don't recall at what point the front partition became a 2Gb, FAT16, but
it must have been around the time that a version of DOS shipped with a
boot manager. So that allowed me to run multiple versions of DOS on
that single 2Gb FAT16. Then I got OS/2, which was/is an actual GUI OS,
so it got it's own partition. Then I got Win 3, which was a DOS shell,
and for as long as Win was a shell, I ran multiple versions of it on the
2Gb Fat16 with the DOS versions.
When Win became a GUI OS it got it's own partition. If you install Win
to an extended partition, it only adds the boot partition. It does not
add a system partition. Since there is already an active partition, it
uses it. Where Win pre-installed with system, recovery and boot
partitions, I give drive letters to system and recovery making them
visible, and change boot and recovery from primary to extended.
And then there is cross platform between OS/2 and Win. The data files -
profiles and mail - of Netscape and it's children - SM, FF, TB,,,, -
are used by both OSs.
And now, a few decades later, I cannot boot FreeDOS on a current laptop.
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