I, @Macarlo, registered user of 212 OS/2 programs, am also registered user of
Power Boot.
I registered it from Digital River Secure Server for immediate download. I'm using
it here and runs fine. I recommend!
You can purchase the registered version in real time from BMT
Micro (RIP). I noticed the demo version is not functional. Bluesky Innovations LLC announces today January 07, 1999 the
availability of Power Boot V3.0 Beta1 for registered users.
New Power Boot features are:
Allows you to prevent Power Boot from showing non-bootable partitions. This helps
reduce unnecessary clutter on screen.
Default Boot Partition : Power Boot will always boot from this partition even if
you have previously booted from another one. If you prefer the old method of booting
from the last boot partition, it is also available.
Boot Profiles : Profiles are partitions which are hidden or visible depending on
which partition you are booting from. For example, when you boot NT, you might want
to hide all the FAT partitions. With Boot Profiles, you do not have to hide the
partitions manually. Then when you want to boot Windows 98, you
may need to unhide the FAT partitions. Again, you do not have to do it manually.
Hid a partition and forgot what it was? With Version 3.x, a hidden partition is
now displayed between <> brackets.
Password modes : Now, you can select whether you want to use the password to prevent
access to Power Boot, or to prevent access to Power Boot options (like the F3 options
menu or other partition-specificcapabilities). This prevents unauthorized people
from changing your settings.
Dummies Mode not dumb enough for you? Now you can set the dumbness level! For the
really dumb, use the arrow keys to select the partition and press ENTER. And you
will boot from that partition.
For OS/2 users with maintenance partitions, now you can set drive letters at the
partition level for HPFS partitions. For example, if the main OS/2 partition is
drive C and the maintenance partition is drive D, you can set each of them
separately. Previously, to boot from the maintenance partition, you had to set
the OS/2 boot drive letter to D, then reset it to C when you decide to boot OS/2
normally.
What is Power Boot
Power Boot 2.1 User's
Guide
Copyright (C)
1997-98 Bluesky Innovations
All rights reserved.
1. Features:
Power Boot is a System Commander(TM)-like utility.
If all you need is the ability to boot from different partitions, Power Boot is
more versatile and much less expensive than System Commander(TM).
Features include:
- hide/unhide partitions on the fly as you boot up. There is no need to
run another program in order to hide or unhide partitions.
- One touch option to configure your system to update an Operating System.
- One touch option to configure your system to install an OEM version of
an operating system e.g. Windows95 OSR2. Very often, these OEM versions
will not install if they detect another OS on the system.
- Power-Chain enabled.
- Give names to your partitions like 'Win95 OSR2' or 'MSDOS 6.22' for
easy identification
- Boot from any one of 63 partitions in any drive. This is only limited by the
ability of the OS to be booted from a drive other than C. For example, Linux
can be booted from any drive or partition. MSDOS must be booted from a
primary partition.
- Supports LBA mode for hard drive access in order to launch partitions in
hard drives larger than 8GigaBytes.
- Once the operating system is loaded, Power Boot does not occupy any memory (Swap
mode off).
- Power Boot does not occupy a partition (unlike OS/2 Boot Manager). It does
not require you to repartition your drive for installation.
- Power Boot does not require any configuration. It is INSTALL and PLAY! If you
have edited lilo.conf and then forget to run lilo before rebooting, you will appreciate
this!
- Features new to Version 2.x include:
. Password : to prevent someone else from changing the boot defaults
or to boot from another partition.
. Save last boot : if you boot from an extended partition or from a
partition on a hard drive other than the first one, this partition
will become the default partition. Power Boot will always boot this
partition without any user intervention.
. Save option settings : all options you set during a boot session
with Power Boot will be saved so that the next time Power Boot starts
up, it will use the same options. For example, if you have set Expert
mode, the next time you start Power Boot, you will remain in Expert
mode.
. Variable timeout : the timeout delay is can now be between 4 to 32
seconds.
. Quiet mode : Power Boot can now start up with just a simple copyright
message.
. DOS Swap Drive: if you choose to boot from a partition that is not on
the first hard drive, you can select a mode whereby this hard drive
will be logically swapped with the first one. For example, assume
that you have C: on one drive and D: on a second drive. Booting from
D: will swap the drives so that as far as the operating system is
concerned, D: is now C: and C: is now D:! This works well with MSDOS
or Win95 in safe mode. That means you can still keep that old
MSDOS/Win3.x drive and install a new multi-giga drive with Win95 or
some other 32-bit OS that can only live on the first hard drive.
. Win9x Swap Drive: Power Boot 2.1 provides this feature that allow you
to boot from Windows 95 that is on a second, third or fourth hard
drive. This means that you can have different versions of Windows95
on different hard drives and boot from them.
. OS/2 boot drive letter : you can choose which drive letter an OS/2
HPFS partition can be booted with. This overrides the default drive
letter allocation which can change drastically when you move hard
drives around or add partitions. With this feature, we have
successfully booted OS/2 from the second hard drive.
2. Installation:
2.1 INSTALL.EXE
The installation program is call INSTALL.EXE. It must be run in MSDOS mode. To
enter MSDOS mode if you use Windows 95, press F8 when you see 'Starting Windows
95..' or boot from the Windows95 Startup diskette. If you are not using MSDOS/DRDOS/PCDOS
etc, you need to boot with a DOS diskette.
There is no need to install a DOS/FAT partition in order to install Power Boot.
Power Boot does not need a DOS/FAT partition to work.
INSTALL has several options:
- Install Power Boot into Drive C
- Uninstall Power Boot
- Create Rescue Diskette (Only available with Registered Version)
"Install Power Boot into Drive C" first saves the critical information
in your
Drive C before installing Power Boot. This is so that should the installation
go wrong (very unlikely), you will still be able to restore the state of your
hard disk. The partition information is stored in a file called PART.BIN. This
file should be stored in a diskette with a copy of INSTALL.EXE.
If a copy of PART.BIN already exists, you will be prompted if you would like
to overwrite this file.
Then the Power Boot program will be written into the MBR of your hard disk. You
will need to reboot to actually run Power Boot.
"Uninstall Power Boot" restores the partition information previously
saved in PART.BIN and removes Power Boot from your hard disk.
"Create Rescue Diskette" allows you to install Power Boot into a diskette.
This is useful if a virus program destroys Power Boot installation. Installing
Windows 95 after Power Boot has been installed will also overwrite Power Boot.
To navigate the options, you use the arrow keys and the ENTER key to select. The
ESC key will exit the INSTALL program.
2.2 Hardware Requirements
Due to the addition features, you will need a hard drive with at least
26 sectors per track.
3. Using Power Boot:
3.1 When you start:
To start up Power Boot, you must boot from your hard disk. Some BIOSes allow you
to set the boot sequence such that you can only boot from Drive C. This is ideal
for Power Boot. If you need to boot from Drive A, you would let
Power Boot start first, and then select to boot from Drive A.
In this way, you avoid booting from Drive A accidentally, which is a primary
means of catching boot sector virus programs.
The following description applies when you have not enabled Quiet Mode.
When Power Boot boots up, you will see the main screen. The copyright message is
on the top. The bottom line contain help information.
Power Boot will enumerate all the partitions in your hard disk and display
them in the center portion of your screen. If you have more than 13 partitions,
there will be more than one page of screen information.
Initially, there is a timeout of 10 seconds. This timeout value can be changed
(see Section 4).
At the end of 10 seconds, the system will boot from the default partition.
Initially, this will be the active partition in the first hard drive. If you
boot from another partition, that partition will become the default one. This
will apply even for partitions which are not in the first hard drive or
those in extended partitions.
At this stage, five keys are valid : Up/Down arrow, ENTER, F1, F2 and F3.
Pressing any of these keys will stop the timeout countdown. Pressing any
other key will skip the timeout and boot the PC from the default boot
partition.
Pressing F1 will display a help panel indicating the keys which are valid.
Pressing F2 will toggle the display between dummies and expert mode. Dummies mode
shows less information than expert mode and prevents information overload!
The default mode is dummies mode. This mode will show the drive, partition name
and partition size. Expert mode will show if a partition is active i.e.
bootable, drive, what type of partition, partition name and partition size.
Type of partition will either be primary partition or logical drive. Note that
some operating systems like Linux or OS/2 can be booted from logical drives.
If you have the registered version of Power Boot, you will be able to name your
partitions. If you are using the evaluation version of Power Boot or if
you have not yet named your partitions, the partition name used will be the
system ID found in the partition table and you will see labels like DOS/FAT16,
Win95/FAT32 or Win95/FAT32/LBA etc.
If you think that such labels are confusing, you will appreciate the ability
to name the partitions.
Pressing F3 will provide you a list of options. See Section 4 for a
description.
3.2 Partition Operations:
Navigation is achieved by the Up/Down arrow keys and ENTER is to select
the partition you want to work on. Once a partition is selected, you will
see a mini-menu with options.
There 5 possible options when a partition is selected:
a. Boot from it
b. Hide it
c. Unhide it
d. Install OEM operating system
e. Upgrade operating system
f. Name partition
Depending on the type of partition selected, not all the options may
be available.
Again, navigation is achieved by the Up/Down arrow keys and ENTER is to
select the option.
Once an option is selected, the hard disk is updated and the updated
partition's information is shown on screen. None of the operations performed
can destroy data on the hard disks as you can always undo them (albeit
manually).
Boot from a partition will unhide it and make it active.
Only DOS/HPFS/NTFS/Win95 partitions can be hidden. The method of hiding
partitions follows that of the OS/2 Boot Manager/FDISK programs.
Installing and OEM OS option will make the partition active and HIDE all
other partitions. This is useful for installing OEM versions of Windows 95.
This is because OEM versions of Windows95 will NOT install if they detect
an operating system already installed in another partition. By hiding all
the other partitions, we prevent the Windows95 setup program from finding out what
is in these other partitions.
Upgrading an operating system option will make the partition active.
'Name a partition' will allow you to attribute up to 10 characters to
a partition. This is in order to help you easily identify partitions. For
example, you may have two different versions of MSDOS, one in German, the
other in English. You can name on MSDOS-D (for Deutsch) and the other MSDOS-E.
4. Power Boot Options
There are five options:
. Set Quiet Mode
. Set Timeout
. Set Password
. Set OS/2 Boot Drive Letter
. Set DOS Drive Swap Mode
. Set Win9x Drive Swap Mode
When you press F3, you will be presented with a mini-menu with the five
options. Use the up/down arrow keys to move the cursor, ENTER to select
and ESC to quit.
4.1 Quiet Mode
4.1.1 Setting Quiet Mode
When you press ENTER for Quiet Mode, you will see a box with:
Quiet Mode Off
This is the initial state. Press SPACE and the box will change to:
Quiet Mode On
Continue pressing SPACE to toggle Quiet Mode on or off. Press ESC if you
want to abandon the changes or ENTER to keep them.
4.1.2 How Quiet Mode works
Once you have enabled Quiet Mode, the next time Power Boot starts, you
will not see the blue Power Boot partition selection screen.
Instead, you will see a dark screen with the Power Boot copyright message.
If you do not do anything, the normal timeout will occur and the default
partition will be booted.
Pressing ESC will short circuit the normal timeout and boot the default
partition immediately.
Pressing SPACE will start the Power Boot partition selection screen with
a list of all potentially bootable partitions as described in Section 3.
If password is enabled, Quiet Mode will be enabled by default and pressing
SPACE will prompt you for the password.
4.2 Timeout
Timeout is not longer fixed at 10 seconds but can vary from 3 to 32 seconds.
When you press ENTER for Timeout selection, you will see a box with:
Timeout(in seconds) : 10
Pressing SPACE will step through the possible timeout values (in ascending
order). Pressing ESC will abandon the selection and pressing ENTER will
save the timeout value selected.
4.3 Password
4.3.1 Creating a Password
When you press ENTER for password selection, you will see a box with:
Enter password:
Passwords can be up to 6 characters in length and are limited to letters and
numbers (no symbols). Uppercase (capitals) and lowercase letters are the same.
Once you have entered the password, press ENTER to save it or ESC to abandon.
Note: Password encoding is relatively simple. Therefore if a high level of
security is really required, other means must be used.
4.3.2 Removing a Password
To remove a password, you must be able to go into the Power Boot
partition selection screen, press F3, choose the Password option. Then
when prompted to enter a new password, just press ENTER. This will disable
the password.
4.3.3 Booting with Password Enabled
When a password is enabled, Quiet Mode is enabled by default.
When you press SPACE at the Power Boot copyright message, you will be prompted
for the password.
Entering a wrong password will prompt you again for the password. This will
occur until you enter the correct password or you reboot the computer.
Entering the correct password will start up the Power Boot partition selection
screen.
4.4 OS/2 Boot Drive Letter
4.4.1 How to use this feature
When you press ENTER for OS/2 Boot Drive Letter selection, you will see a box with:
OS/2 Boot Drive Letter : AUTO
Pressing SPACE will step you through all possible drive letters : from C to
Z and back to AUTO again.
Pressing ENTER will save the drive letter.
Presssing ESC will abandon the changes.
AUTO means that an OS/2 logical drive will be booted as D: and an HPFS
primary partition will be booted as C:.
If you have installed OS/2 as drive D:, you can move the hard drive to
be the second hard drive in your system, and then boot OS/2 as D:. This
will effectively boot OS/2 from a second hard drive.
This means that you can have one hard drive dedicated to OS/2 and one to
MSDOS, Windows 95, NT etc.
Note that if you have several OS/2 boot partitions, you will have to select
the OS/2 Boot Drive Letter for each partition before you boot it.
4.4.2 Compatibility Issues
In some cases, you may still need to re-install some applications. This is
especially so if you have previously been booting with Boot Manager.
We have observed that if you installed OS/2 on a logical partition with
a FAT primary partition visible (not hidden) during the installation, then
you must ALWAYS have this primary FAT partition visible whenever you boot
OS/2 from the logical partition.
Similarly, if all the FAT primary partitions are hidden during the OS/2
installation, then they must remain hidden everytime you boot OS/2.
4.5 DOS Swap Drive Mode
4.5.1 Setting Swap Drive Mode
When you press ENTER for Swap Drive Mode selection, you will see a box
with:
Drive Swap Off
This is the initial state. Press SPACE and the box will change to:
Drive Swap On
Continue pressing SPACE to toggle Drive Swap on or off. Press ESC if you
want to abandon the changes or ENTER to keep them.
4.5.2 How It Works
If you choose to boot from a partition that is not on the first hard drive,
this hard drive will be logically swapped with the first one.
For example, assume that you have C: on one drive and D: on a second drive.
Booting from D: will swap the drives so that as far as the operating system
is concerned, D: is now C: and C: is now D:! This works well with MSDOS, Win95
in safe mode or any operating system that uses the BIOS for hard drive
accesses.
The usefulness of Drive Swap Mode is that you can now keep that old
MSDOS/Win3.x drive and install a new multi-giga drive with Win95 or some
other 32-bit OS that can only live on the first hard drive.
One point to note for Win3.x users is that Drive Swap Mode will not work with
32-bit disk access. Make sure you disable that before trying to use Swap
Mode.
If Drive Swap Mode is on and you boot from a partition that is not on the
first hard drive, the Drive Swap code will be loaded into memory and that
will occupy 1KByte of conventional memory.
NOTE : Drive Swap Mode, if enabled, will always be activated whenever you boot
from a hard drive other than the first one.
4.6 Win9x Drive Swap Mode
4.6.1 Setting Win9x Drive Swap Mode
Beginning from Power Boot Version 2.15, Win9x Drive Swap will be
automatically enabled if you try booting a Windows 95/98 partition from any
hard drive other than the first one.
Win9x Drive Swap mode allows you to select if you want Power Boot to
automagically hide the FAT primary partitions of preceeding drives when
you boot Win9x from a hard drive. For example, to boot Win95 from your
second hard disk, you will need to hide the primary FAT partitions on your
first hard disk. Instead of doing this manually, Power Boot can do it
for you. Logical drives on your first hard disk will not be hidden and can
be accessed.
This partition hiding is necessary because in most cases, you will have
installed Windows 95 as Drive C. The first visible FAT partition will be
labelled as Drive C: and you want this partition to be the want you are
booting from.
4.6.2 How Win9x Drive Swap Works
Win9x Drive Swap will tell the Windows 95 boot up code that it is not booting
from the first hard drive.
In order for this to work correctly, you will have to hide all FAT16/FAT32
primary partitions in the hard drive before the one you are booting from.
Note that you do not have to hide any logical drives on the first hard drive.
In this way, you can put your data on the logical drives, and share them
between the Operating System residing of the first hard drive and the new
Operating System on the second hard drive.
Note : Win9x Drive Swap will not be activated when DOS Swap is enabled.
4.6.3 Installing Win9x on a Second/Third/... Hard Drive
Method A:
To install Windows 95 on a second hard drive, you should connected it as the first
one. Install Windows 95 as drive C: and then re-connect the drive to
its final position (as the second, third, fourth etc hard drive).
This is our recommended method of installation.
Method B:
Alternatively, connect the target drive normally. Partition it using
Win95's FDISK or our PDISK. Format the partition making it bootable by
using FORMAT x: /S (where x is the drive letter of the target drive). Copy
over the necessary config.sys with the CDROM driver and MSCDEX.EXE.
Reboot the PC. When Power Boot starts up, enable BIOS Drive Swap.
Let the PC boot to the target drive.
Now, install Win9x (Win95 or Win98). In this case, you will not have to
re-install Power Boot after the Win9x installation.
Let Win9x finish its installation until you see the final Win9x user interface
screen with all the icons.
Now, shutdown the PC and restart it. When Power Boot starts up, disable
DOS Drive Swap and choose 'Hide Partitions' for Win95 Drive Swap Mode.
Select the target drive to boot from. Now you will boot into the target
drive.
Voila! You have just installed Win9x into a another hard drive.
The FAT primary partitions on the first drive are hidden. When you next
select to boot from a primary partition on the first drive, the partition
will be unhidden automatically.
5. Pointers:
Here are some hints for using Power Boot. If you have found other tricks or
important points to note, please do not hesitate to let me know.
5.1 Window 95 Installation
Windows 95 installation will over-write the master boot record of drive C.
If Power Boot is installed in drive C, you will need to reinstall Power Boot.
5.2 Linux Users
We are sure that LILO is much more powerful than Power Boot... However, if you
are using Power Boot with Linux, don't forget to install LILO in the boot
sector of the partition from which you want to boot Linux.
We know that Debian automatically installs LILO in the boot sector so that
you can simply install Power Boot and launch Linux or another OS in another
partition.
5.3 Using Partition Magic or Partition-It
Once you have used Partition Magic or Partition-It to create new partitions or
resize old ones, your partition tables would have changed.
DO NOT, in ANY circumstances attempt to remove Power Boot with INSTALL.EXE.
Doing so will reload the OLD partition tables.
In order to remove Power Boot, in this case, go to MSDOS mode and run
FDISK /MBR. This will write a generic partition sector into your hard disk.
Apparently, Partition-It will overwrite some sectors used by Power Boot. When you
reboot after using Partition-It, you will get a brief Bad Checksum message. You
will need to re-install Power Boot.
5.4 Rescue Diskette
When you use Power Boot from the Rescue Diskette, not all options will be
available. Partition naming will not be available as well as most of the
F3 options. The only F3 option that is available is OS/2 Boot Drive Letter.
The reason is that most of the options information is stored in the hard
drive along with the Power Boot code. When you boot from the rescue diskette, we
do not want to assume that the hard drive is available for storing this information.
6. Compatibility:
Power Boot is resident in the Master Boot Record(MBR) of your hard disk. It
will not work with most other MBR programs except Ontrack Disk Manager. It will
not work with EZ-Drive. EZ-Drive support will be available in early 1998.
The registered version of Power Boot is Power-Chain-enabled and will co-exist in
the MBR with other Power-Chain software like The Z-pA or The ZppA.
7. Problems:
As in any other program, there're probably bugs lying around.
Note that the unregistered version of Power Boot has a time limit.
After one month of utilisation, all options will be disabled. You will only
be able to boot from the default partition.
The registered version of Power Boot will have the following addition features:
a. Creation of rescue diskette, run Power Boot even if your MBR
has been corrupted for some reason.
b. Naming of partitions
c. You will be able to daisy chain multiple MBR programs.
d. All the features of Version 2.1
e. Free updates
Disclaimer:
Bluesky Innovations specifically disclaims all other warranties, expressed or
implied, including but not limited to implied warranties of merchantability
and fitness of a particular purpose with respects to defects in the diskette
(if distributed on magnetic media) or documentation, and the program license
with respect to any particular application, use, or purpose. In no event
should Bluesky Innovations be liable for any loss of profit or any other
damages, including but not limited to incidental, consequential, or other
damages.
System Commander is a trademark of V Communications Inc