[REM]

Hello everyone,

It's been quite awhile since I've logged on. I hope this isn't old news:

I got an IBM NetVista to work on. It was horribly contaminated. Nothing could be done in normal boot, at all. It booted smoothly into safe mode, but neither the CD drive, nor the USB ports were active.

There was no bios option of anything resembling a boot order. It simply checked the floppy drive, and booted from the boot partition if there was no floppy.

I took the long road. I managed to defrag in safe mode. Then I partitioned the 10 gig drive into two 5 gig partitions with Ranish Partition Manager. Worked great! After copying the infected boot partition to D:, I did a fresh install on C:. Then I was able to clean the infected D:, and then save the Quicken data the guy badly needed onto a USB drive!

Afterwards, I formatted D:, installed XOSL, and prepared to xxcopy /clone the new, updated boot partition to D:, as I always do, cuz' I know he'll be back. This is WinMe, btw. I do two partitions of a clean and updated install, so that it's a snap to format C: and xxcopy /clone D: back over.

After installing XOSL and copying the partition I noticed that I could not access the menu after post to boot up in safe mode. If anyone can direct me on this, I'd appreciate it. I've struck out. XOSL takes charge immediately following post.

Anyway, I came upon an article about using a boot CD via XOSL, even though the bios doesn't support booting from a CD! It works like a champ! If anyone is having problems with an "inept" machine, consider this solution. XOSL is easily installed, and uninstalled. Had I tried this, I could have saved a lot of time.

Cheers!

[dirkgently42]

Hi REM, long time no see.

I wasn't aware of this utility. It seems like a handy app.

XOSL 1.1.5 is included with UBCD 3.4 under boot managers.

..... related
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XOSL

http://xosl2.com/

Quote

The original XOSL was developed by Geurt Vos. After over 5 years of suspended production John Marlowe has continued the development under the XOSL2 title.

[pcuser]

XOSL has been in my toolkit for a long, long time and I still use it on alot of dual-boot setups. The "boot from cd" feature is very handy when working on legacy hardware, I also like how it can dynamically set a certain partition as "active" before booting it so you can have multiple versions of Win9x/DOS on the same drive.

[webmedic]

I used to use xosl a long time ago. Havn't for years though

As for xosl2 look nice but it would be nice to have a compiled binary. I can compile things all day under linux and package things up and whatnot but under windows I havn't the faintest idea how to compile anything.