gHacks technology news » boot manager http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Tue, 24 Nov 2009 03:24:03 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 How To Manage The Windows 7 Boot Menu http://www.ghacks.net/2009/11/12/how-to-manage-the-windows-7-boot-menu/ http://www.ghacks.net/2009/11/12/how-to-manage-the-windows-7-boot-menu/#comments Thu, 12 Nov 2009 11:21:40 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=18436 If you have installed Windows 7 on a computer system that was running a different operating system before chance is that you now see that other operating system in the boot menu during startup. There is not really a need for this unless you decided to go with a dual-boot system for some time. Users who completely switched to Windows 7 might want to remove the old operating system from appearing in the Windows 7 boot menu to speed up boot time and avoid possible mistakes like booting into the wrong operating system.

Windows 7 users who want to remove, edit or add entries to the Windows 7 boot menu have two basic options. The first is available in form of the Msconfig utility that ships with every version of Windows 7. Msconfig might help but it can happen that it is not displaying the other operating systems as was the case with our Windows 7 Pro test system which we upgraded from Windows XP Pro.

The second and more reliable option is Easy BCD, a boot menu editor for Windows 7.

windows 7 boot menu

The software program comes with the means to remove, edit and add operating systems in the Windows 7 boot menu. It is for instance easy to remove an existing entry by opening the Add/Remove Entries menu in the program, selecting the operating system that should be removed and clicking on the Delete button.

The application does provide access to extensive settings ranging from configuring the bootloader timeout to advanced options like configuring DEP/NoExecute settings, debugging options or limitations to the cpus and physical memory. The boot menu manager offers a backup option so that the previous settings can be recovered in case of an emergency.

Easy BCD is exactly what the name implies, easy to use. It can be downloaded at the developer’s website where it is available for Windows Vista and Windows 7.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2009/11/12/how-to-manage-the-windows-7-boot-menu/feed/ 34 Windows Boot Manager http://www.ghacks.net/2008/09/20/windows-boot-manager/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/09/20/windows-boot-manager/#comments Sat, 20 Sep 2008 13:38:49 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=7130 Many users shy away from installing multiple operating systems on their computer because of problems that can arise in the boot sector. Some operating systems like to replace the existing boot information with their own which would mean that the user would have to find a way to replace or add those boot information again so that all operating systems would show up when booting the computer.

Windows boot manager Boot-US is a universal boot manager that can boot many operating systems properly including all versions of Microsoft Windows from Windows 95 to Windows Server 2008, MS-Dos, Linux, Free BSD, VMWare and several exotic operating systems like Oberon, Novel-DOS or QNX Realtime Plattform.

The boot manager itself can be installed in the MBR (Master Boot Record), the primary partition or on disk. The latter being an excellent way of testing the boot manager before installing it on the hard drive.

Other interesting functions of the Windows boot manager are (Windows because it is a Windows application):

  • Support for hard disks up to 2048 GB (2 TB)
  • Allows booting beyond the 8 GB limit
  • Partitions can be created, deleted, activated and hid
  • Password protection for boot manager and configuration program
  • Command-line and GUI version
  • True hiding of partitions

During program start the Windows boot manager is displaying the discovered partitions and the existing operating systems. It is important to make sure that the information that are displayed are correct before installing the boot manager. The user should also consider making backups of the list of partitions and boot sectors to be able to revert back if the installation of the boot manager goes wrong in any way. Those are just precautionary measures.

After that the user should install the boot manager to a floppy disk first if one is installed on the computer system. Most modern computers come without a floppy disk drive. Those users can check out the Copy and run Floppy Boot Disks from USB to add the boot manager to an USB device and boot the computer system from that device to be able to test the boot manager. Make sure to select Do not change partitions IDs in step four of the boot manager creation.

When the test is going through without errors the boot manager can be installed on the primary partition or Master Boot Record. The software developers recommend to install the boot manager in the primary partition if possible.

The Windows Boot Manager Boot-US was tested on a Windows XP Service Pack 3 test system without difficulties.

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