OSL2000: Advanced Boot Manager for multi-boot systems

OSL2000 is an advanced multi boot manager using which you can install, boot, and manage up to 100 independent operating systems in your computer. It lets you have independent copies of Windows – even multiple copies of the same Windows in one system, which isn’t allowed by the Windows boot manager. This is because OSL2000 is more advanced than Windows boot manager or GRUB (used on Linux systems).

Installation and uninstallation is easy and fully automatic – it configures the boot menu and can automatically detect new operating systems when they are added or removed. OSL2000 installs on most systems except on those that have special boot-time low-level disk utilities, such as GoBack installed. It is also not fully compatible with some dynamic disk array configurations (esp. mirror and stripping). In such cases, you might need an emergency disk to roll back to your previous configuration. This can be created during installation and takes just a minute.

OSL2000 has a feature called AutoBoot that lets you boot into different OSs from the current OS before you restart the computer. Just type the boot number – 1 for the first boot entry, 2 for the second boot entry and so on – and OSL2000 will automatically restart your system and boot into the OS you specified. You do have to remember the booting order, which shouldn’t be difficult unless you have a ridiculous number of operating systems installed. Better still, you can create desktop shortcuts for each boot entry and use that instead.

When AutoBoot is used along with the Stealth mode, the boot menu is not popped-up and it does not wait at all. Instead, it just directly boots the boot menu entry specified by the AutoBoot option.

Normally, when you have multiple copies of Windows installed and boot into one copy, you are able to access all other Windows partitions in your system. With OSL2000 you can hide all copies of Windows in your system from each other.

When you boot Windows from a primary partition, this feature hides all other partitions except logical partitions. So, even with the AutoHide feature enabled, you can still use your logical partitions to store and share common programs and data. But, when you boot Windows from a logical partition, the AutoHide feature hides all other partitions including logical partitions.

OSL2000 also has a manual hiding feature by which you can hide only selected partitions from showing on the boot menu.

To prevent unauthorized editing of the boot menu, the administrator can protect the boot menu settings with a password.

OSL2000 is free and supports DOS, Windows, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD and many others.

Related: PLoP Boot Manager