Partition manager

[Rory]

Has anyone tried using the free ranish partition manager
from ranish.com to manage mutiple Windows 2000 and other
Windows OSs on mutiple boot setup?

How does the product work for you? I am only interested
in using this at home in my test environment so it does
not need to be 100% reliable. I just don't want to buy
paragon or other manager for $40-$50 if I don't have to.

If not, how about another free or cheap product?

Thank you,

Rory

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

I have been using XOSL for quite some time. It includes
the Ranish boot manager, and is free. It works extremely
well: I use it to boot Win98, WinME, WinNT, Win2000
and WinXP all on the same disk, with each OS (and its
boot files!) being on its very own partition. Therefore,
when I boot into WinXP for example, WinXP and its
boot files are visible on drive C:. The other OSs are
completely invisible and inaccessible.

 

[John John]

Pegasus has pretty well answered your question in regard to Ranish
Partition Manager. It works well but it's a bit on the technical side.
If you want something that is a bit easier to use or more user friendly
you can try BootItNG by TeraByte Unlimited. It works pretty well but I
have found it to be a bit clumsy at resizing partitions. Other than
that it works pretty well and allows you to have more that 4 active
partitions providing that you do not use fdisk to create any partitions
in the first place. In any case resizing partitions is always a bit of
a tricky proposition and your best defense is to really take your time
and plan your partitions very carefully before you start, if need be
take a pencil and paper and do some calculations as to the number and
size of partitions needed.

BootItNG is available here: http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootitng.html

Final advice, BootItNG recommends that you allow it to create a small 8
MB partition for itself before you create any other partitions. It is
not necessary but highly advisable and recommended that you do so.

John