JdBP>> The reason that many people recommend Boot Manager
 JdBP>> over Dual Boot is that this argument was hashed out
 JdBP>> long ago in the public networks.
 FS> Yes, technically.  However, I think the folks doing all the
 FS> "hashing out" in the networks are much more capable of
 FS> repartitioning their existing primary drive (without
 FS> disaster) than the average user.  [ ... omitted for brevity ... ]
 FS> I'll bet 80 percent of home users didn't even install their
 FS> existing operating system and probably have never installed
 FS> one at all.  I think it's somewhat unrealistic to expect
 FS> very many home users to work out all this Boot Manager and
 FS> partitioning stuff.  Hence, IBM's "default" of Dual Boot.
I agree that many users may well prefer not to learn about partitioning.  
But, on the other hand, when _I_ first installed OS/2 (I'm an OS/2 user, too, 
after all), I took the time to read the user manual and learn about Boot 
Manager, so I won't accept that _all_ users prefer not to learn these things. 
 Indeed, I highly recommend that people using computers _do_ learn as much as 
they can about them, whatever their reasons for using computers.  A good tool 
is only a good tool in the hands of someone knowledgeable enough to put it to 
its full and correct use.
I disagree, however, that your reasoning above is IBM's motivation for Dual 
Boot.  We can discount those 80% of users that you mention, because if they 
don't install operating systems, they won't be OS/2 users.  OS/2 preloaded on 
a retail PC is an exceedingly rare thing indeed, and by far the overwhelming 
majority of OS/2 users (certainly as far as these echoes are concerned) have 
installed it themselves.  Which means that OS/2 users, in the main, _are_ 
going to be those other 20%, who will be prepared to repartition and reformat 
if required.  One just has to look at the number of times over the years that 
people have enquired about OS/2 FAT defragmentation utilities to know that a 
fair proportion of OS/2 users are people who _aren't_ squeamish about 
performing procedures on their hard discs that entail an amount of forward 
planning and care.
I suspect that IBM's reason for giving OS/2 the capability to Dual Boot was 
more motivated by marketing ideas akin to Select-A-System rather than by care 
for people who, in all honesty, don't comprise OS/2's target market.
In any case, Dual Boot allows even a moderately sophisticated user to cause 
himself far greater difficulty and to make much more of a mess of his system 
by accident than Boot Manager does (e.g. booting to DOS and mangling the EAs 
of the Desktop directory), something that weighs very strongly against the 
few points that are in Dual Boot's favour.  
 ¯ JdeBP ®
--- FleetStreet 1.19 NR
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