The slightly more sophisticated features - copying disks and moving partitions - are the beginnings of a project to create a free replacement for certain proprietary tools such as Partition Magic, Drive Image, and Norton Ghost the same user-friendly GUI environment, yet still small enough to fit on a boot floppy.

The Visopsys Disk Manager does most of what you’d expect from your basic ‘fdisk’ tool, whilst maintaining safety through MBR backups and ‘undo’ functionality. The overall design goal is always to cherry-pick the best ideas from other OSes, preferably contribute a few new ideas, and hopefully avoid most of the annoying stuff.

It is compatible with existing filesystems, file formats, protocols, and encryption algorithms (among other things).

There are a number of command line programs that are superficially UNIX- or DOS-like, so you shouldn’t have too much trouble finding your way around. On the other hand, much of what you see in Visopsys will be familiar. It’s not a Windows or UNIX lookalike, nor a clone of any other system. The ISO and floppy images available from the download page can install the system, or operate in ‘live demo’ mode. It’s been in continuous development for a number of years, though realistically the target audience remains limited to operating system enthusiasts, students, and assorted other sensation seekers. Added to this is a bare-bones C library and a minimal suite of applications - together comprising a small but reasonably functional operating system which can operate natively in either graphical or text modes. The bulk of Visopsys is a fully multitasking, 100% protected mode, virtual-memory, (massively!)-monolithic-style kernel. It can also copy hard disks, and has a simple and friendly graphical interface, but can fit on a bootable floppy disk (or CD-ROM, if you’re feeling naughty). It can create, delete, and move partitions, and modify their attributes. From the perspective of a user - the “but what the heck is it good for?” perspective - its primary selling point is a reasonably functional partition management program (the ‘Disk Manager’) in the vein of Symantec’s Partition Magic. On the other hand, it’s still a one-person project. Needless to say, it’s not as good as Linux. Other operating systems can do more than Visopsys it doesn’t include many applications. It is largely a supplemental (and bugfix) release for the recent 0.4 version, but continues where 0.4 left off in terms of improving the overall look and usability, as well as providing a few new user tools to experiment with. Release 0.41 of Visopsys is now online at (freshmeat announcement).

Norton ghost 2002 boot disk download