Will Plop boot manager interfere with Novell safe data area?

[michaelmensch]

Will Plop boot manager interfere with Novell safe data area?
Novell stores info (computer name, workgroup,....) about the windows system in a few of the unused sectors in the beginning of the hard drive to be used with the zimaging program.
I believe that there is about 64 unused sectors.
I know that Dell will put stuff there for their utility partition and that will interfere with the Novell safe data so we have to delete the dell partition and hidden info to image.

Here is my problem and what I want to do.
* Problem
  I work at an Engineering school and inorder to let the students use programs like LabView and other hardware related stuff they need admin rights. As you can figure out they tend to mess the computers up and I have to reimage. Well the image is now over 20Gigs. (I have to install alot of programs) Now reimaging takes a long time. (>1 hour)

* What I want to do
  I would like to create 2 or 3 other identical windows partitions (at this time WinXP, but soon Win7) with all but one of them hidden. When they corrupt one of the partitions I can hide the bad one and switch to another and the class can continue with no delay. I would then reimage the bad partition when we have more time.

Is this something anyone else has tried?
Will this boot manager work for this end?

[Elmar]

hi,
the boot manager is stored in the first 63 sectors of the hard disk, so it doesn't work with novell safe data

regards
elmar

[michaelmensch]

Do you use all 63 - are any one of them free?

[Elmar]

sector 2 is free