I need a 8086 and DOS compatible boot manager [#TPCXmas24 Part 7] #DOScember

Here's TPC's video Advent Calendar 2024, revealing door No. 7 for December 7th:
So I had this wonderful COMPAQ Portable Plus installed for dual-booting MS-DOS and XENIX.
Of course, I could just type "DOS" on the XENIX loader prompt, but I rather prefer some kind of graphical menu selection.
Not an easy task, as basically all boot manager out there require an 80386 or later CPU, or is it?

To support TPC, check out all my options on

This video was made possible with support by:

THE PHINTAGE ENTHUSIASTS:
Alisha Emanuela Stutz @alishamanuelastutz
David Schell @TheMinocula
Christian Zerrahn @JARVIS1187
Waseem al sammane @wsammane

THE PHINTAGE SUPPORTERS:
HMK @hmichaelkraut7968
John DiLiberto @JohnMDiLiberto
Jack Rosenthal @JackRosenthal1
Matthew Veety @MatthewVeety
MS-DOS Manfred @msdosm4nfred
Steven Glogger @sglogger
xcalibur839 @xcalibur839

Links:

A review of 50 Boot Managers:

Additional technical details:

Xenix Boot Loader manpage:

SYMON boot manager:

eXtended FDisk with boot manager:

WWBMU boot manager:

BOOTMGR - multi-BOOT ManaGeR:

PowerQuest, PartitionMagic, BootMagic:

Copyright @ 2024 THE PHINTAGE COLLECTOR, Gianpaolo Del Matto. All rights reserved.

Theme Music composed by Abdallah El-Ghannam.

[bamdadkhan]

i'm really starting to get fond of these vids.. 'see you again tmw' - like hanging out with a mate

[RetroTechChris]

Fantastic! Yea, big BootIt Bare Metal fan here. It's good to see the other options though, especially for 8086, and the PDF you pointed to is a great read.

[JohnSmith-iucj]

Amazing, boot managers are the best! Good old bootmagic and bootit. I will soon try grub. It can also chainload. I think it could chainload all the other bootmanagers as well 😂

[EpsilonsReviews]

Thank goodness for that hero who (whom?) uploaded that package and documentation of 80x86 boot managers! Have a good one Phintage Collector!

[hyoenmadan]

In the past, before the advent of PLoP, I used to use Smart Boot Manager to boot from CDROMs on machines without CDROM boot support in BIOS. Unfortunately, looks like the boot manager requires a 386+ CPU as well.

Is interesting the first versions of Partition Magic for DOS were in fact a port of the OS/2 Partition Magic. Later versions (3 and onwards) were based on Windows 95 Win32 version of Partition Magic.

[RFGSwiss]

1:52 this remembered me, win95 just took under 100mibs. and still, i remember it as the first space hungry os.

[JimLeonard]

System Commander 3.0 and earlier also run on 808x. I managed a few DOS versions that way when vintage-computing in the late 90s. One of its neat tricks is allowing the installation and management of multiple versions of DOS in the same partition (it swaps files in/out when you pick your boot selection).

[kFY]

Pretty anachronistic, but neat.

TBH, even the fact that you can type "dos" in the Xenix bootloader surprises me. I thought that at the time, the only intended way of doing multi-boot was changing the active partition in the MBR before rebooting when you wanted to switch OSes.

It's also weird to think that a conceptually similar idea - picking a different OS *from the currently running one* - is still the "normal" way of multi-booting on Macs. It actually makes multi-booting on Apple Silicon somewhat frustrating, because the pre-boot OS picker is cumbersome to launch and (unsurprising considering that it's actually running under a separate, minimal copy of macOS, but that doesn't make it any less frustrating).

[ruben_balea]

I never needed to boot another OS... Edit: I used loadlin to "boot" Linux from DOS/Windows 9x

[fnjesusfreak]

I use Ranish Partition Manager on my 286 but no idea if it's usable on the 8088.

[JohnSmith-iucj]

Many of these old boot managers seem to be written by Germans.