Originally Posted by
nkedel
What tool did you use to put DOS onto the USB stick? Are you telling the machine to boot specifically off the USB -- usually via the F11/F12 boot-up menu?
My brain and some old Peter Norton books. Certain files have to be there in order and that should be enough. And, yes, I can see the one-time boot menu. Interestingly enough, with no usb stick, boot from USB is an option. When I put the stick in, that option disappears. I dunno why. It was late, so I quit.
Originally Posted by
nkedel
I can't see why someone would WANT to multiboot, but not WANT to take the time to learn about virtualization.
Because I don't care enough about it at this point to delve into it. I just want to be able to boot whatever OS I want like I've always been able to do.
When I make my living with computers. they're just boxes that perform various functions, Yeah, I have to know a lot about what goes on under the hood, but I treat them pretty much as appliances. Tweaking them for maximum whatever is not high on the priority list.
Maybe when I have nothing better to do I'll look into it. It's already on my to-do list, but fairly far down.
Originally Posted by
nkedel
Commercial 3rd party utilities are so 1990s.
and I'm so 1960's
Originally Posted by
nkedel
UEFI, "Unified Extensible Firmware Interface" is a new standard that replaces the old interrupt-based BIOS.
Yeah, I googled it (and found out it's UEF
I - on my screen the I looked like a 1).
"UEFI eliminates the old-fashioned BIOS", followed by "UEFI runs on top of the BIOS". Hello?
The purpose of the BIOS is to provide a standard interface for the user software to access the hardware - the board-specific BIOS handles the details so you can write software that will run on any machine without having to customize it. I believe this function is still required. The end user ('the great unwashed') couldn't care less about how it's done. Many of my students were not even aware that such functionality even existed on their machines, much less that it was required. I suspect that 95 out of 100 people I would ask would never have heard of UEFI (unless I was asking at a Developer's Conference or something).
Bt the way, I think it also makes a nice, juicy target for hackers and virus writers, too. No need to write OS-specific malware - just get into the UEFI code and you can do your dirty work without any OS even running. This, I understand, is a 'feature' of UEFI. Just sayin'.
Meanwhile ... there is apparently still a healthy market for third-party boot managers out there, and my specific questions were -- what do you do (you answered) and have you used EasyBCD (still no answers).