Boot Manager Software

I know lots available.

Anyone any particular experience using these? Pros and cons of any particular offering?

I know they are not necessary. In past I have let Grub or Windows Boot perform Operating System selection in multi-boot systems. OK, so that works, but can get messy when removing an OS. Not too bad in XP, where repair console easily used to rebuild MBR when needed. Can be more of a hassle with other OSs.

I have decided that the machine upon which I regularly try out operating Systems will benefit from being equipped with boot manager that is independent of any OS.

Grateful for any advice.

ps Used Boot Magic some decades back. It is too antiquated though for me to consider.

Though, I do want that facility of easily adding and removing OSs on future occasions.

 

I know this is rather late, but...

Grub is actually pretty easy to update the menu entries when you add or remove an OS. Just run a command (I think it's "update-grub") and it will automatically scan the PC and add entries as necessary.

 

With the "Legacy" (BIOS) motherboard:

1) Boot-US: for multi-booting and "true-hiding" partitions with different installations of Windows.

http://www.boot-us.com

https://www.boot-us.de/eng/tips_w05.htm

https://www.boot-us.de/eng/tips_w08.htm

2) Grub4DOS: for multi-booting one installation of Windows and different Linux distros.

http://grub4dos.chenall.net/categories/0-4-5c/

http://reboot.pro/forum/66-grub4dos/

In the past versions labelled 0.4.5c were considered more stable than the ones labelled 0.4.5a but I'm not sure if this still holds true today. I just keep using v0.4.5c-2016 on a few machines without any problems. Grub4DOS is much easier to manage that Grub2 which is bundled nowadays with most Linux distributions. It consists of only two files which can be manually copied to the root of drive C. A new MBR or Partition Boot Record can then be created from Linux terminal.