Andy Roberts wrote in a message to Linda Proulx:

 AR>>> OTOH if all your partitions were "primary", then none of them
 AR>>> would be able to see any of the others on the same HD.  [It's after
 AR>>> 1AM, so I hope I got that right.  If not, someone else will correct me,
 AR>>> I'm sure. ]

 HS> This is a common belief, but wrong, at least for DOS and Win95.  These 2
 HS> OS's do see all the primary partitions on a single hard drive.  Your 
 HS> machine is living proof (at least for DOS).  I can't swear to it, but I'm
 HS> almost sure that OS/2 would also see them all.

 HS> If you explain this to him, he'll no doubt ask how the heck (and possibly
 HS> why the heck) you created 4 primary partitions on one drive, since FDISK
 HS> will refuse to directly do this.  The answer to "how" is that I used my 
 HS> bag of tricks - a combination of FDISK and Norton Utilities.  "Why" is a
 HS> much longer story.

 AR> I am curious as to why.  What advantage does that have over
 AR> using Logical partitions?

I'm also curious as to how he gets DOS DOS/WIN to see more than one primary
partition at a time?  This would _seem_ impossible if all on the same drive
with or without Norton Utilities.  Then I'd also want to know the _why_ he did 
it that way to beging with.  Very curious, and interesting. I hope she shares
the info with us.

 AR> I know I for sure, and probably Jack too, have been using
 AR> OS/2 with HPFS for so long that we don't give much
 AR> consideration to any other OS (other than leave C available
 AR> for WinXX.)  Since OS/2 runs virtually all DOS prgms, we
 AR> tend to delete DOS.  That makes it very easy to dump all the
 AR> "DOS-Think" limits and considerations.  Some of which may
 AR> have lead to your unusual setup. 

I've seen more people run into trouble trying to keep DOS around and run OS/2
concurrently than enough.  It usually is done by people that don't have faith
or skills to figure out how to get OS/2 and OS/2 DOS cooking.  They end up in
all sorts of goofy situations.  The worst is "Duel" boot.  That was about the
dumbest thing IBM did with OS/2.  First, it only takes a few seconds to boot
DOS from a floppy, so if for some very strange reason you ever had to do that
(I never have in 9 years) then, stick in a DOS boot disk and boot the darn
system, no big deal.  For 99.999% of everyone, if you boot to DOS more than
once or twice in your life, you are doing something wrong and don't understand 
what OS/2 can do for you.  DOS95 is another issue however, since that version
of DOS is so convoluted you must boot the whole show before it's worth much,
so boot manager is the solution to that.

 AR> I am curious about another thing.  Are you attempting to
 AR> learn enough to do all the Hardware changes and upgrades and
 AR> installations and re-installations and setup of various OSs
 AR> and apps all by yourself?  Or are you going to have your
 AR> guru do the work for you?

From her questions, I'd think she should be able to do it herself, with a
little advice here and there that we all need from time to time.  Most of it
is pretty simple, since I've been successful.

                                              Jack 
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