> Multi-booting all those OSes off a single partition is very *VERY* > much a hard way of doing this.
Actually, no it's not. It's fairly easy with System Commander. And AFAIK, System Commander is the only multi-boot manager that works this way (manipulating the boot files instead of manipulating disks or partitions). Both approaches have advantages and disadvantages. > VirtualBox is free. It runs DOS with aplomb. You could run all these > DOS versions in separate VMs, with no overlap, and custom config > files. As are QEMU, BOCHS, PCem, etc. All the VM's have advantages and disadvantages in various respects. The way I have my system set up I only need one VHD and it will work with (almost) any VM, including VirtualBox, and a bunch of different versions of DOS. In terms of the amount of work it takes to set things up, I think my setup is less work than creating 20 (or whatever) different VHDs (each for a different OS). My setup is definitely less work than trying to track and maintain all the different VHDs to make sure they remain consistent with each other. > You could have a separate D: drive on a separate virtual disk, with > the programs you're testing in it. That's what I do now (or at least can do if I want). But, I can also put the test program on the common VHD if I want instead of a separate VHD (and if it's small enough I usually do that). With your setup it MUST be on a separate VHD or I would need to copy it 50 (or whatever) times instead of just once. So, my setup is more flexible in that sense. > Or you could use VMWare Server, which is freeware, and in which this > is a built-in facility. In addition to the VMs mentioned above, I also have others including VMWare and DOSBox and do tests with all of them. VMWare and DOSBox are somewhat unique in that they can mount physical hard drives instead of just virtual hard drives. That allows you to have similar setups in both a VM and on the real hardware (if you boot the real hardware to DOS, which I also sometimes do). There are lots of different ways to "skin the cat" and there is not one "correct" way. There are tradeoffs and problems with every approach. But, for what I'm trying to accomplish, I think my setup is better (at least easier to track and maintain) than what you're recommending. _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
