The Most OS's on one Machine

[beekman]

Most people got a w2k/98se setup, does anybody have more than that. I am wondering how many you can fit on one box.

 

[Noriaki]

I had Win2k, Win98SE, and Linux.
Those 3 + BEOS is fairly common as well.

My friend has Win2k Pro, Win2k Server, 2 Win98s and Linux.

(He uses Pro and 98, and needed Server, a Clean 98 and Linux for a class he's in).

 

[vash]

With a few hard drives and a bit of time on your hands and possibly some helper apps, you can have virtually as many OSes on your box that you want. System Commander is a common helper application that allows multiple booting partitions, but there are other third party ones as well.

Lilo (and the equivalents in other Unix's) can do it as well, but System Commander was made specifically to allow booting multiple OSes. The most pain in the arse (ihmo) to get dual booting is Windows 9x because of the reliance on it MUST being instaleld on the primary partition of the very first hard drive it sees. Every other OS out there allows to be put onto non primary partitions and not all of them need to overwrite the boot sector. Even with these limitations, dual booting with Win9x is a snap because its so "dumb" when it comes to seeing other OSes.

I've had to test multiple OSes (combination of muliple Windows 9x and NT with different languages) and have used 3-4 at a time on the same machine.

vash

 

[IamDavid]

I used to run a Quad boot system with Win98SE/Win2K/Redhat/BeOS.. I found myself using Win2K more and more so I dumped everything else.

 

[SUOrangeman]

I quad-boot Win2K, WinME, Linux-Mandrake, BeOS. I have the same at work and added FreeBSD for a second.

I just got two 36GB SCSI drives at work, so who knows what may be next! Muhahahaha!

-SUO