About
Multibooters.com

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Traditional methods of repairing or replacing a damaged or buggy operating system are either too time consuming or too hit and miss for our likes. The best recovery method available of restoring a backup image of the OS could take 30-60 minutes and perhaps twice as long again to bring the restored operating system up-to-date and then another 30-60 minutes making the new backup image. Then of course there is always the hold your breath moment at the no going back point where you are watching and waiting to see if the restore has been successful and the computer would indeed boot back into life. This unsatisfactory nature of images mean they are almost looked upon as a last resort and so will be avoided if at all possible. Time will therefore be wasted trying to repair bugs or problems in a current system in the desire to postpone the loss of perhaps an entire afternoon or more restoring and updating a computer instead of just using it.

Multibooting with various different OSes has obvious advantages but in addition to that and in our opinion the main and best use of multibooting is to provide a means of recovering from operating system problems in as short a time as possible. If you have a couple of identical and fully up-to-date clones of the main operating system that you can simply reboot the machine into, then you can escape gremlins or disasters and be back to work like nothing had happened in literally just a couple of minutes. The full potential of using clones and multibooting for backup and disaster recovery seems to escape most people on first hearing, so we have a page dedicated to trying to explain its many advantages over all other types of maintenance and recovery. Multibooting with clones for backup and recovery.

Our aim is to try and help more people benefit from the advantages of multibooting by providing clear and non-technical articles and guides that can be followed and understood by people other than the higher level computer enthusiast or IT pro. We have heard it said that 95% of Windows users have never used the command line or a DOS box or Terminal and have no desire or time to learn. This website is predominately for people who are perfectly happy knowing absolutely nothing about computer languages or code and we hope to show that you do not need a background in computing to be able to create and understand a multiboot machine.

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Of course we want to cover all aspects of multibooting so there will be some in-depth material for the tech guys, but where possible this will also be written in plain language and in a way that any able layman should be able to understand. On the odd occasion that we have no option but to get a little technical we will try and provide step by step guides to help almost anyone follow along. Only the Tech Bench stuff will be aimed at the real enthusiasts and may not be sufficiently explained or elaborated upon for the novice or layman.

The building and launch of the site has been the first of the major hurdles that we had to jump. Now that is done we can get on and focus our attention on writing more of the articles and guides that we would like to see on the site. We have a mammoth task ahead of us for sure and many times since the project started we have found ourselves daunted by the scale of the challenge. The current level of content is probably less than 10% of what we envisage to be added as time allows over the next few years, so please bear with us if you think something is missing from our site. If it is relevant to our topic then I'm sure we have considered it and probably already added it to our to-do-list, (which seems to get noticeably longer every time I look).

To begin with we have focused on the basic practices and theories and groundwork knowledge that it is essential to be familiar with if you want to be safely messing with partitions and hard drives. Next up we want to add more guides and reviews of specific software and of individual manufacturer’s PCs. We hope to build a reasonable list of particular makes and models of laptops and desktops and examine their factory supplied configuration so we can detail how best to deal with them. To this aim we hope to call on the personal experiences of our visitors and readers, so if you think you might want to help us with this project then please keep a look out for our Projects Page, which hopefully should be coming along soon.

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The Virtual Future  A mixture of traditional multibooting and virtual operating systems can let you have the best of both worlds. The virtual world is constantly evolving and improving and becoming more practical and reliable. As time allows we will be trying to bring you the plain language low down on all that is relevant for the average PC user.

Unified Extensible Firmware Interface  The new UEFI firmware that is just starting to replace the traditional BIOS on PC motherboards will mean a change also to the style of partitioning on the boot hard drive. The GUID partition table (GPT) will make redundant most current bootmanagers and software for cloning, imaging and partitioning. We hope to be able to keep you on top of the changing face of multibooting over the next few years.

User Forum  We would love to see it and it has always been our intention to have a forum as an integral part of the website. The reality for now is that we simply do not have the time to spare and we don’t feel comfortable in merely overseeing a forum that we ourselves are not able to take an active part in. For sure it will happen, but not for a little while.

Our Tech Insight and Tech Talking articles and tutorials delve a little deeper into the workings but still try to explain a topic in clear and non-technical terms. They are primarily aimed at the able layman but we have been told by some pros that they helped them towards some crucial insights.

Tech Bench - Extra technical stuff that is not required or essential reading.
At the foot of some of our pages you may see this Tech-Bench box with some extra technical info and links for the enthusiasts and pros. It should only be stuff that the average PC user could happily live without, so don't worry about skipping it..