Chapter 1. Introduction
This chapter contains the following general information about Acronis OS
Selector:
Acronis OS Selector as a Boot Manager
Acronis OS Selector as a Partition Manager
Acronis OS Selector Key Features
Main Disk Administrator features
Acronis OS Selector System Requirements
How does Acronis OS Selector Function?
What is a Boot Context?
1.1 Acronis OS Selector as a Boot Manager
The main function of a boot manager is to allow the user to install multiple
operating systems on one computer and to choose the necessary one when
the computer is booted.
All boot managers can be divided into several complexity levels:
1. Boot managers that are able to boot an operating system by reading the
boot sector from the first sector of a partition. These boot managers do
not recognize file systems and hence cannot support multiple operating
systems that are installed on one partition. They have the simplest user
interface and occupy minimum disk space. The examples are OS/2
BootManager and Linux’s LILO.
2. Boot managers that can load the boot sector from a file with a specified
name. These usually are parts of an operating system (built-in boot
managers) that are supposed to somehow help the operating system to
co-exist with other operating systems. Built-in boot managers have the
simplest user interface. Examples are: NT OS Loader.
3. Full-scale boot managers that can detect file systems (FAT), recognize
different operating systems, and are able to automatically detect them.
These boot managers are aware of system and configuration files of
operating systems and are able to create backup copies of them, to allow
the user to have multiple operating systems with same system file names
or multiple copies of configurations of one operating system on one
partition. Examples are: BootWizard 3.x, System Commander, BootIt.
4. Only Acronis OS Selector 8.0 can be put on the last, highest level of
complexity. Unlike all other boot managers, it allows users to have
multiple operating systems with same named system folders on one
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