Topic: Dual Booting

[Sam]

Can i set up SME on a second partition on the hard drive & Dual boot.

This is not for full time use, just to learn & develop before putting it iinto full use.

Thanks

[Urirama]

No, SME will format and use the whole harddisk, deleting any partitions that were on it. What you can try is installing SME on one disk, then put another one in and try to dual boot from there.  Haven't tried it though!
The second disk should not be attached while installing SME, or it will take both disks.

[Jason Judge]

If you need to install it often, investing in some removable drive cadies may be a good idea. SME will obliterate all disks it finds (if it finds more than one non-identical disk, then the results according to the manual are 'undefined' - so assume obliteration). To this end, I would disconnect every drive that you want to protect then reconnect them for dual-booting after SME is installed.

I haven't tried it, but I see no reason why lilo cannot be configured after installation to boot from any disk on the system. In short - SME needs a disk to itself and will take the WHOLE disk as its own.

-- Jason

[Jeff C]

I find VMWare is a great testing environment and SME works just fine in it.

http://www.vmware.com

Hope this helps...

-jeff

[Ray Mitchell]

Dear All
I have not tried this, but was thinking to do it soon to see if it works.
Most PC's have dual channel hard disk controllers. A second smaller hard drive (for sme experimentation) could be installed and either setup as a slave on channel 1 or master (or slave) on channel 2. (Not sure whether to actually jumper this as a master or as a slave though for this purpose). In the bios at boot up disable the current Ch1 master HDD and enable the Ch1 slave (or enable the Ch2 master or slave). The idea being that only one hard disk is active at a time.
The normally used OS can be on HDD1 and the experimental sme or whatever can be on HDD2, could also have a HDD3 if a third OS was required (shared with the CDROM drive on Ch2).
It's prettyeasy to edit the bios at boot up and select which hard drive is active and therefore which operating system would load.
This way the OS's are all completely separate on different HDD's without risk of crashing or corrupting other data etc.
Any thoughts/feedback ??
Ray Mitchell