Okay, maybe a dumb question. I don't know the underlying fundamentals of the Ultimate Boot CD; it seems to boot and load the menu, then with each choice it loads something else--something that could itself have been loaded directly at boot, almost like it is rebooting.

Now the question: can a full-blown Ultimate Boot CD be placed on a hard drive, so that it can be booted from the hard drive and allow running all (or selected) programs, such as Ranish Partition Manager?

Yes. Its possible, I doubt it is posibble with the default windows xp vista bootloader..you will probably have to install grub or another boot loader. Maybe icecube will find this post and give you a hand.

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~Just StopSpazzing~

Visit the UBCD Wiki: http://wiki.ultimatebootcd.com
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You can do it with grub4dos.

The code that you need in your menu.lst file.

Note: not every program will work.

Tutorial about grub4dos (how to use, install):
http://diddy.boot-land.net/grub4dos/Grub4dos.htm

You need to make the ubcd411.iso file continuous (see tutorial for the reason and the programs that you can use).

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Download Ultimate Boot CD v5.0: http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.html
Use Parted Magic for handling all partitioning task: http://partedmagic.com/

Wow, thanks both of you for the information. Let me take some time to digest the grub4dos stuff.

If it makes any difference, I'd like to use this on XP (SP2) and eventually on Windows 7; I don't really care about Vista, though I understand that Vista has a different boot method. I suppose Windows 7 will share Vista's method rather than XP's method?

Oh, and I also wish to use a third-party boot manager, probably XOSL2.