BootPart 2.60: Boot Partitions for WinNT

Bootpart 2.60 is compatible with Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Windows XP.

You may download BootPart 2.60 by ftp or http :

	File Name	Description
	bootpa26.zip bootpa26.zip (ftp link)	Bootpart 2.60 in English. 26,172 bytes
	bootpa26_64.zip bootpa26_64.zip (ftp link)	Bootpart 2.60 in English, with 64 bits build. 78,083 bytes
	bootpa25.zip bootpa25.zip bootpa25.zip (ftp link)	Bootpart 2.50 in English, with LBA support. 26,729 bytes
	bootpa22.zip bootpa22.zip	Bootpart 2.20 in English. 25,525 bytes
	btpafr22.zip btpafr22.zip	Contains the french documentation. You will also need bootpa25.zip. 72,462 bytes

Russian users may visit the Russian page by Yuri Lysenkov.

BOOTPART lets you add partitions to the Windows NT/2K/XP Multiboot menu. Usually, you will only have a MSDOS or Windows 95 entry and one (or several) Windows NT entries on this boot menu.

With BOOTPART, you may add any partition to the menu. You may add an OS/2 Multiboot partition, or a Linux Partition (with Lilo) to this menu.

The only thing I highly suggest is : your active partition on your first hard disk must be a FAT16 primary partition. This may be a small partition.

It seems it's actually impossible add an HPFS partition with OS/2 boot. If you find a workaround, please let me know.

BOOTPART creates a 512 byte file which contains an image of the boot sector that loads the boot sector of the partition. After, this file is declared in C:\BOOT.INI (a text file used by the Windows NT boot menu). The boot sector itself comes from FDFormat and WinImage.

The current version 2.50 now has very cool features : repair the Windows NT loader boot sector on Fat partitions (but Bootpart cannot perform the repair running under Windows NT/2K/XP), easily add both MS-Dos 6.22 and Windows 95 to the boot menu, support FAT32 partitions and disks over 4 GB, LBA support (for disk over 8 GB)...

Fast tips

Repairing the Windows NT/2k/XP boot sector on a Fat partition

Windows NT installs a boot sector that launches NTLDR and displays the Windows NT boot menu. If you lose this boot sector, BootPart can restore it.

Boot under MS-Dos (this can be a copy of MS-Dos 6.22 on your hard disk, on a MS-Dos bootable floppy, or the "MS-Dos 7.0" included in Windows 95 (you can obtain it by pressing Shift+F5 when Win95 loads). Then, enter the command :

BOOTPART WINNT BOOT:C:

If you want to remove the WinNT boot sector, you can replace it with the command "BOOTPART DOS622 BOOT:C:" or "BOOTPART WIN95 BOOT:C:"

How to have both MS-Dos 6.22 and Windows 95 in the NT menu (forget F4 !)

The standard situation for a computer that multiboots to Windows NT, Windows 95, or MS-Dos 6.22 is : the user selects a "Windows 95" entry in NT menu, and, then must press F4 if he wants to boot MS-Dos 6.22. If you don't have this situation (i.e. : you don't have both Win95 and MS-Dos 6.22 on your system, but want to have both), see the next section.

Just enter these BootPart commands :

BOOTPART DOS622 C:\BOOTSECT.622 "MS-Dos 6.22"

BOOTPART WIN95 C:\BOOTSECT.W95 "Windows 95"

BOOTPART REWRITEROOT:C:

The last line (REWRITEROOT:C:) MUST BE EXECUTED UNDER MSDOS, and moves the MS-Dos IO.* and MSDOS.* files to the beginning of the root directory, which is required for successful operation.

You may visit the page : http://www.bcpl.net/~dbryan/directboot.html for obtaining more information on triple booting WinNT/Win95/DOS.

If you have WinNT & Win95 and you only want to add MS-Dos

Take an MSDos 6.22 floppy, copy the files IO.SYS, MSDOS.SYS, and COMMAND.COM to C:\ as IO.DOS, MSDOS.DOS, and COMMAND.DOS (warning : these files may be hidden, but you can tweak some settings to make File Manager or Explorer to make them display hidden files). Then follow the instructions in the section section "How to have both MS-Dos 6.22 and Windows 95 in the NT menu"

If you have WinNT & MS-Dos and you only want to add Win95

Install Win95 in a new directory (start the install under MS-Dos 6.22 or Windows 3.1) and then follow the instructions in the section "How to have both MS-Dos 6.22 and Windows 95 in the NT menu"

How to add OS/2

Unfortunately, I can't directly add an OS/2 partition by itself (if you have a workaround or fix, I'd be happy to hear about it !). Install the OS/2 Boot Manager (you need 1 MB free on your first hard disk), add the OS/2 partition in the boot menu with automatic startup (0 seconds wait time), and then add the OS/2 Boot Manager partition to your NT menu with BootPart. Sometimes, when you install the OS/2 Boot Manager, it becomes the active partition of your first hard disk. You can use FDISK to set the partition with NT boot manager as the active partition later.

How to add Linux

For Linux, you must install Lilo at the beginning of the Linux partition (as is the case with the OS/2 boot manager) and then add the Linux partition with BootPart:

When you install Linux or run liloconfig, select "Superblock of the root linux partition" as the location for Lilo. On my own Linux box, this added the line "boot=/dev/sdb4" into the file /etc/lilo.conf

If you want mount your NTFS partition under Linux, visit the NTFS for Linux page.

For more info about mutlibooting, you may take a look at http://www.bcpl.net/~dbryan/directboot.html or at a modified version. There is also a tutorial to use NT loader to boot into BeOs.

Microsoft has also several KB article about the boot process : Q102873 describes Boot.ini, Q289022 describe how modify Boot.ini, Q101787 describes the boot process itself, Q227704 describes the signature syntax on boot.ini.

Windows NT Magazine published an article named Mastering Multibooting Madness.

Article Q157992 and Q153762 describe booting with both Win9x and MS-Dos 6.22 with the NT Loader, Q833721 and Q170756 describe boot.ini available switch options, the Sysinternals site also contains a page about Boot.ini options.

If you want to backup Long File names in a FAT partition under MSDOS, Duncan Murdoch's DOSLFNBK utility may prove useful. (you can visit his page here).