What are the BootIt NG System Requirements?
The minimum system requirements for BootIt NG are:
- A 100% IBM-compatible personal computer with an i80386 compatible microprocessor
- 16MB of RAM
- VGA capability
- A floppy diskette drive, CD/DVD drive, or USB flash drive (booting in floppy mode)
- A BIOS-accessible hard drive
BootIt NG relies on the BIOS for processing disk functions. If your system BIOS limits access to the hard drive for any reason, and no MDT driver is available to correct the limitation, BootIt NG will also be limited. BootIt NG supports BIOS LBA Mode and Interrupt 13h extensions.
BootIt NG is not compatible with any "Drive Manager" type software. "Drive Manager" software is used by systems which have a large hard drive which the onboard BIOS does not support.
If you are using EIDE drives, then for maximum compatibility with Microsoft Operating Systems and to reduce potential problems with unaligned partitions, please set your BIOS to LBA mode. In most BIOSes, this mode can be found to the right of the drive parameters. If it is not set to LBA by default, it may be set to AUTO, NORMAL or LARGE, which you should change to LBA. The easiest way to change this is to use the auto detect option in the BIOS setup. When you run that option, choose the LBA mode option it gives you (which is usually the default and you can just press 'Y'). Please note the following:
- Changing the mode from NORMAL or LARGE to LBA (and in some limited cases, from AUTO to LBA) may require the need to repartition the drive for proper operation of an existing OS installation.
- Some of the new BIOSes (probably changes to the BIOS by some motherboard manufacturers) take all control away from you. It will override and change your CHS settings based on the partition entries in the MBR regardless of AUTO mode being disabled. This change can cause problems getting certain operating systems to boot. However, even if your system happens to have this problem, if you use BootIt NG to do all your partitioning and leave the Align on End option enabled (as it is by default), then you'll never have to worry about it.
SCSI users should include the drives in the BIOS scan, use Extended BIOS Translation for DOS Drives, and BIOS support for Int13 Extensions.
If you're using an Adaptec SCSI AHA2940UW (or family) controller, then the SCSI BIOS must be at revision 1.3x or greater. The 1.2x versions have a serious bug which causes memory corruption when Int 13h extensions are enabled. If your hard drive is less than 8 GB, then you can disable the Int 13h extensions and the bug won't show itself.