iM-Boot Duo – a new hardware dual-boot solution

December 23, 11:09 AMGadgets ExaminerDan Appleman

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im-Boot Duo fits into an external expansion slot

There are a number of software solutions that allow you to boot two or more operating systems on the same computer. Most operating systems support some form of dual-boot capability. Software, such as Norton’s PartitionMagic include multi-boot utilities. There’s even a book “The Multi-Boot Configuration Handbook” to help you figure out which approach is best for the operating systems you are using.

Multi-booting is useful both for developers who need to test software on multiple operating systems, and for families who wish to provide added security between their “clean” system and whatever the kids are putting on their systems.

But software multibooting solutions suffer from two major problems. First, not every operating system and OS version plays nicely with multibooting. For example: try to install Windows XP after installing Vista on a machine, and you won’t be able to boot Vista anymore. Second, generally speaking, every OS has full access to all of the hard drives in the system – meaning that if one OS is infected with a virus, it can easily infect the other OS partitions.

Enter iM-Boot Duo – a SATA drive switch that lets you physically select between two hard drives. This offers a level of isolation that is impossible with a software solution – when a drive is switched out it is completely inaccessible. There is no possible way for the drives or operating systems to interact or even be aware of each other.

Hopefully the product will not only work as advertised, but will be the beginning of a line of such devices (a dual or triple switch would be needed for RAID configurations, a 1x3 or 1x4 would allow mutlibooting more than two operating systems).