Quote Originally Posted by garyng
My understanding of SBM and the like is that they are good multi-partition boot manager(thus sit in the MBR of a HD), meaning each partition would have its own boot sector(LILO/GRUB/NT etc.).
Yes, that is correct.

Quote Originally Posted by garyng
The only thing I don't like it is that it use track 0(sector 1+) to store itself, and they sometimes step on each others feet.
I'm not sure about SBM, I haven't used it enough to be sure. But I have it on a test system with SBM on the MBR and both Win98 and Debain (with lilo or grub, I forget which, installed to the Linux partition) and it works just as expected. You have to make SBM do a rescan to see the new partition (not obvious unless you read the instructions, and who does that?), but it worked well for me for a win/linux multi-boot system.

XOSL plays a lneat game to make sure it doesn't get messed up. I mentioned that you should have a floppy drive available. At one point in the install XOSL writes a floppy for you (be sure that you give it a formatted empty floppy that does not have a bootable system hidden on it - just a nice empty floppy with no bad sectors). The you can go ahead and install any operating system that you want. When a Linux system asks, you should install the Linux boot loader in the Linux partition. But if any OS gets nasty and overwrites the MBR without asking (for example, Windows), no problem. Rather than cursing that it stepped on XOSL's feet, you just use the floppy that you made to put back the XOSL system as god wants it. So that planned for OS's that try to step on your feet.

By the way, SBM lives in the boot track and needs no extra space. XOSL is larger, it gets installed in the MBR but part needs to be installed elsewhere. They author recommends storing it in the Windows partition, but it can be installed in it's own tiny partition too. I like and use the tiny xosl partition technique, because I frequently rewrite my Win partition with different "ghost" images and don't want to risk wipeing out any of my XOSl changes when I reload a backup of the partition.

I really think you'll be happy if you try XOSL. If not, no real harm done, you can delete the XOSL partition and user Lilo, Grub or Fdisk /MBR to put the master boot record back the way that you want it, and you'll have a little bit more experience working with partitions and the MBR stuff, which is always worth knowing.

Oh by the way, another nice thing about XOSL is that you can add menu entried to boot from CD (any CD drive) and/or floppy (again, any floppy, such as Drive B). Then you set your BIOS to boot from the hard drive first and never have to change it. You boot into the XOSL menu and from there if you want to boot a CD or floppy you can, but it will be a deliberate choice (you should never end up running one by accident or infecting your system with a virus that is spread on the floppy boot sector [Michelangelo, Stoned.Michelangelo, ...]) Lots of other nice little features too, like the ability to hide one or more partitions from any OS when you boot. So if you don't want the Linux user to even see the XP NTFS partition, it's easy to make that happen. Or some Linux OSs could see and share a partition but you could still conceal it from other Linux OSs that you boot. Each linus could be hidden from the others, if you want, to be sure the different flavors of Linux don't "step on each other's toes".