Copyright (c) 2000 by James Su (suzhe@gnuchina.org), Lonius (november@video.mdc.tsinghua.edu.cn) and Christopher Li (chrisl@gnuchina.org)

What is it

Smart Boot Manager (SBM) is an OS independent and full-featured boot manager with an easy-to-use user interface. There are some screenshots available.

The main goals of SBM are to be absolutely OS independent, flexible and full-featured. It has all of the features needed to boot a variety of OSes from several kinds of media, while keeping its size no more than 30K bytes. In another words, SBM does NOT touch any of your partitions, it totally fits into the first track (the hidden track) of your hard disk!

SBM now supports booting from floppy, hard disk and CD-ROM. There are plans to support ZIP and LS-120 in the near future.

Smart BootManager is totally FREE! So feel free to help us! Or just tell us you are using SBM! You can post your ideas, suggestions and bug reports on our Mailing List, or just mail me.

The latest stable version is Smart BootManager 3.7 release 1

Read news page for the newest information about SBM.
Download Smart BootManager at the download area.
Read the documentation for more help.

Key Features

Only the key features are listed below. There are many others not listed.

• Automatically searches drivers and partitions
  Smart BootManager can automatically search and locate all the floppy, hard and CD-ROM drives as well as partitions. It can distinguish whether a partition is bootable or non-bootable, and only incorporates bootable partitions into the Boot Menu.
• Powerful Boot Schedule
  You can assign a time schedule for each Boot Record (a partition or a driver). Smart BootManager will boot them automatically at the time specified. For example, you can schedule your computer to boot Windows 98 at the time when you start work during the week and boot Linux at midnight or during the weekend.
• Booting from CD-ROM
  Smart BootManager supports booting from almost all kinds of IDE ATAPI CD-ROMs, including PCMCIA CD-ROMs. You can let the BIOS boot from C: only and assign a password for it, then you can boot from CD-ROM with Smart BootManager. If you have a laptop with a special PCMCIA CD-ROM which has no support for booting in the BIOS, Smart BootManager can help you boot from it.
• Swapping driver ID
  Smart BootManager can boot most operating systems from not only the first hard disk but also others. If you have more than one hard disk in a computer and run different operating systems on each, this feature is very useful.
• Auto Delay Boot
  Smart BootManager can boot the default boot record automatically if no keys are pressed within a specfied delay time. By combining this feature and the Boot Schedule feature, you can let your computer boot different operating systems automatically according to the schedule table.
• Sending keystrokes to the operating system
  Smart BootManager can preload some keystrokes into the key buffer before booting an operating system to control its booting process. For example, you can send Shift-F5 to Windows 98 to let it go into the real DOS mode.
• Easy Customized Theme file
  The theme file includes all screen elements, such as window colors, messages, background, font etc. It does not contain any program code, so you can change Smart BootManager's Look and Feel without recompiling it. Just choose your favorite theme and install it. Smart BootManager now has six themes with different languages, including English, Chinese, Czech, German, Hungarian and Russian. More themes with other languages will be out soon. If there is no theme for your native language, you can create one yourself. Read the documentation for details.
• Password protection
  You can assign a password for each partition or drive, and also set a password for administrator. There are three security levels in SBM.
• Y2k bug work-around for old BIOSes
  You can set current year in SBM to bypass the buggy old BIOSes' Y2k problem.

Copyright

Smart Boot Manager is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.

Authors

• James Su
  Main program, Documentation, Installation program and some utilities.
• Lonius
  Installation program and Makefile.
• Benoit Mortier
  A theme in French.
• Frédéric Bonnaud
  A theme in French.
• Lenart Janos
  A theme in Hungarian.
• Dirk Knop
  A theme in German.
• brz@post.cz
  A theme and documentation in Czech.
• Victor O`Muerte
  A theme in Russian.
• Manuel Clos
  A theme in Spanish.
• Risko Gergely
  A UNIX Configurator program for Smart Boot Manager.
• Christopher Li
  IDE ATAPI Driver and debug/program tools for NASM.
• Bill Hults
  Grammar correction for English documentation.
• Andre Maldonado
  Portuguese theme
• Santiago Garcia Mantinan
  Y2k workaround patch

Thanks to:

• Linuxrat ( linuxrat@263.net)
• Frédéric Bonnaud ( tux.le.pengouin@free.fr)
• Zak Meekins ( zmeekins@email.sjsu.edu)
• Gnagno ( gnagno@tiscalinet.it)
• Patrick van Brakel ( patrickb@wfw.wtb.tue.nl)
• njh ( njh@hawthorn.csse.monash.edu.au)
• David Craig ( dcraig@csrd.uiuc.edu)
• Lenart Janos ( lenart@atom.hu)
• Risko Gergely ( risko@atom.hu)
• Christian Ullrich ( chris@chrullrich.de)
• Sam Varghese ( sam@gnubies.com)
• Udo Jocher ( udo@udoj.org)
• Benoit Mortier ( opensides@caramail.com)