 Ottawa PC Users' Group, Inc.
Product Review
Smart
Boot Manager
by Alan German
When playing
around with various flavours of Linux, I ran into a
problem trying to install the OS from a bootable CD-ROM
onto my old desktop machine. Basically, the machine
wouldn't boot from the CD. Since the BIOS was set up to
go to either the floppy disk, or the CD-ROM, before
booting from the hard drive, I figured that this old
machine just didn't support booting from a CD. But, while
researching the problem on the Internet, I came across a
really neat little utility – Smart Boot Manager
– that provided the solution.
Smart Boot Manager is an open-source package that weighs
in at under 70 KB. While the basic instructions for using
the program are displayed when you run the executable, I
would recommend that you also download the program's 200
KB PDF documentation file. You will find that the program
has a ton of features, including password protection,
automatic searching for bootable drives and partitions,
booting into a default drive after a specified delay, and
even scheduling booting into different drives depending
on the day of the week or the time of day. The program is
available in multiple language themes, each of which can
be customized.
Of course, if you are like me, all you will need to know
is “sbm -t us -d 0” which is the command to
have Smart Boot Manager create a bootable disk with a US
(i.e. English) theme on floppy drive a:
Rebooting the computer with this newly created boot disk
in the floppy drive, produces an on-screen menu of
choices of bootable partitions. In my case, the
“CD1” menu item was my previously unbootable
CD-ROM. Selecting this option did indeed boot the machine
from the CD. Now, that's what I call a smart boot
manager!
Bottom Line:
Smart Boot
Manager, Version 3.7 Release 1 (Open source)
Principal Authors: James Su, Minghua Chen and Christopher
Li, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
http://sourceforge.net/projects/btmgr/
Click here to view the
full OPCUG website with frames.
Copyright and Usage
Ottawa Personal Computer Users Group (OPCUG), Inc.
3 Thatcher Street, Ottawa, ON K2G 1S6
The
opinions expressed in these reviews do not necessarily
represent the views of the OPCUG or its members.
Send
comments or suggestions to the .
|