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One Big Multi-Boot

Y

ybkusybkus

Junior Member
I have two 80gig HD's and was looking to multi-boot:
Windows 2000, 98, FreeDos, and some linux flavors
Fedora, Xandros, RedHat, Caldera Open and possibly Slackware.

I might save a partition for WinXP if I can ever get a hold of it.


From my understanding for Windows to boot it must be on the first sector of HD 0 on IDE 0. (first gig or two)
I don't know where to put FreeDos. Will it need to be on the first sector? I thought some linux guys put that together.

And some questions:
Does an OS need to be on a primary partition?
Can you only create 4 primary partitions on a drive?
Should I use something like partition magic?
What boot manager would you recommend? GRUB, LILO, ect...
I am also very curios as to which order I might choose to install these as many like to load their boot loader into the MBR.

With any luck I would like 20gigs for each OS but space really doesnt matter I am just looking to get familiar with these OS's.

Sorry for the load of Q's, I'm going to continue my research but any ideas or answers would be welcome. 🙂
 
Check out http://ranish.com/.
It's a free partition manager and boot loader. With it you can boot any OS of any disk and partition. It has a challenging learning curve but is very powerful once mastered.
 
Well, I have run into some problems. I used Ranish Partition Manager to setup my 8 partitions. One for XOSL and the rest for the OS's. They are all primary partitions on two different HD's. Windows 2000 works. FreeDOS wont boot: says that theres no bootable disk. And when I boot to Xandros linux I get a jittery screen full of 40 40 40 40 40.

Are the installs just screwed up or is there another boot manager I could try?
 
Windows has to be installed first on a Primary parition, then create a big secondary partion. Once you have installed windows, then you go ahead and install the *nix that you want. The *nix installation disk will take care of settingup a bootloader and repartitioning things with the right filesystem.
 
Heres how I am going to partition and install my OS's, Any comments or reccomendations would be welcome.

Disk 0, 80gig
Primary 1 - XOSL Boot Loader, FAT-32, 100mb
Primary 2 - Windows 2000, NTFS, 30gig
Primary 3 - FreeDOS, FAT-32, 10gig
Primary 4 - Fedora 2(linux), ext3, 39.9gig

Disk 1, 80gig
Primary 1 - Win 98se, FAT-32, 10gig
Primary 2 - Windows XP, NTFS, 20gig
Primary 3 - Xandros(linux), ext3, 25gig
Primary 4 - Red Hat, ext3, 10gig
Unpartitioned: 15gig

I was hoping to get Slackware and Caldera Open on there as well. Can I boot to an extended partition and better yet can I create a linux extended partition to put Slackware and Caldera on.

Any help is welcome, thanks
 
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