Good Day.

I'm looking at rebuilding my home servers over the next month and
wanted to get off on the right foot.

I currently have two machines (cheap ass e-machines) that have been
very stable. At least one of them has a bios that would allow me to
boot from a USB device, though I;ve never tried.

Here's how I operate today.

One is PROD and the other id DEV. Both windows 2000. Both have at
least 4 partitions, at least two configured bootable from the windows
2000 menu. Both have a 5 gig FAT partition, not formated for boot.

My recovery model basically consists of doing weekly DB backups and and
a quarterly full drive image using ghost. To recover, I boot from a
norton CD that loads USB drivers and allows me to restore disk images
from an external usb drive.

I'm looking to move to windows 2003 and sql server 2005 and so I'm
going through the install process on a partion on my DEV server. Once
that install feels stable enough I will make two ghost images I likely
will never need to use.

Here's what I want to do.

I'd like start from scratch with a bootmanager that will allow me to
boot from DOS, Linux, XP, 2000 and 2003. Currently, I don't think I can
even boot from XP and 2003 on the same machine boot menu... not sure
but I think I tried and could not.

Some things I want:

* To be able to boot to the DOS prompt from the boot menu and see all
my drives and recorver and rearrange
* To be able to boot from a USB flash and see all my drives and be able
to recover and rearrange partitions. Ideally to be able to see network
drive spaces.
* A boot menu with boot options for all the mentioned OSes

I don't see BootIt NG offering any USB bootable option, but if it is my
best option I may not need a usb boot option if a safe alternative is
out there that does not require a working primiary drive or CD drive.

At a high level what are my steps if I go with BootIT?

Install Bootit? where?
Backup? where?
Boot disks? locations?
Reformat? Repartition? after what?
restore? when from where?
expected recovery steps if I loose my primary drive and the system no
longer boots to whaterver boot menu?
Once stable what can I expect to see when I boot?
what would be the steps if say, I wanted to add a dos boot partition?
do I need to have a copy of DOS or can I use rawrite? how?

sorry for the 20 questions.. Im just a bit puzzled when I see all these
new recent sw tools that require you to first make a floppy bootable so
you can copy the bootsector to a flash drive for flash drive boots..
huh? what if you don't have a floppy and your os does not support
formatting with the dos os? Why isn't there a generic bootsect or tool
that can format a flash for boot.. perhaps flashboot can do this.

Thanks!