Help with a triple boot system

[jamesdsimone]

I have been building dual boot systems for a while. I have a WinXP/Win7 running now. I have been doing Windows/Mint also. I like Windows 7 because it is compatible with a lot of games I play. I have a copy of Windows 8.1 Pro. Any advice on Win7/Win8.1/Mint setup? I have a pair of 750GB Black drives one ext 4 for Mint. Can I partition the other and install Win7 beside Win8.1? Should I just cut it in half? I have 5TB of storage drives so I'm not too worried about running out of space on the boot drives.

 

[Shmee]

I am not sure exactly what the best way to configure the multiboot is, but I assume you are using the LInux GRUB bootloader? Or how do you usually do it?

My only suggestion would be that you should use SSDs as boot drives for any modern OS, it will load much faster and be more responsive.

 

[mikeymikec]

+1 booting from SSDs.

In theory I'd just install the oldest version of Windows on one drive or partition, then the next oldest, then Linux. Linux ends up handling the bootloader.

In practice though, why do you want a triple boot situation? I also dual-boot and it's a pain having some resources in one OS and some in another (and I too have a shared drive), to divide your resources into three just seems like an exercise in masochism.

Can you not make do with virtual machines for at least one of these operating systems? The differences between Win7 and Win81 are so minimal that my only guess why you're wanting to do that is that Win81 is still supported with security updates.

Here's my OS situation:

SSD #1: Win10 gaming (and a couple of apps that require hardware access for recovering data - work related)
SSD #2: Linux

After that I have two VMs on Linux: Win7 and XP. The XP one isn't strictly speaking needed any more, once I made the decision that I had enough room on the Linux SSD then I moved the hard drive image for Win7 over to it and so it boots about as fast as the XP image does. Sometimes it's just handy having a Windows install easily available without having to reboot, I have a couple of apps in there that in theory could be handled in Linux with Wine, but since I found that MS Access 2000's font handling wasn't great with Wine, I kept my Wine usage as basic as possible.

Occasionally more VMs are spawned whenever I want to play with other Linux distros (Kubuntu and me are not a perfect fit, but perhaps I'm a fool for looking for a better fit, Win10 certainly isn't for me! Win7 and Lubuntu 18.04 LTS were).

 

[JackMDS]

Take a look at this it helps in such situat

https://neosmart.net/EasyBCD/#comparison

There is also a freeware version.

 

[jamesdsimone]

The Win7/8.1 would be for gaming. Win7 works with a lot of watch I play but want an OS that supports DX12 too. I always use the LInux GRUB bootloader and it has alway handled the dual boot without a problem. The system has 2 750GB drives 2 2TB drives and a 1T drive. I have the drives from old build so don't want to spend money on more drives. Besides I have 8 SATA ports and with 2 optical drives and an external dock all of them are used. When I bought the MB I didn't notice it only had 6 SATA so I had to get a 2 port add in card.

 

[mikeymikec]

Win81 doesn't appear to support DX12, I googled a bit earlier.