[wplug] Booting 5 OSes? Is this possible?

[Jonathan Billings]

On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 11:33:53PM -0400, Zachary Uram wrote:
> 1) Is this possible?

It certainly is possible.

> 2) How do I setup grub (or lilo) to do this?

You'll want to stick with GRUB for this.  I suggest reading the
documentation for GRUB.  The windows entries are simple, you define a
title, root, and then use the chainloader (which just starts up the
bootloader on the windows partition).  'info grub' is a good place to
start, if you can stand using GNU info.

> 3) What order do I install each?
> 4) How should I handle setting up the partitions?

You'll probably benefit from partitioning the disk ahead of time for
the windows partitions.

In general, windows doesn't play well with others, so install the
oldest windows versions first.  After all the windows are installed,
install the two linux OSs.  You might want to create a shared swap
partition between the both of them, since there's no point in wasting
space or a partition number.


> 5) Any special tips?

Don't be too upset if you end up accidentally wiping another OS's
partition accidentally, on your first attempt.  It'd probably be handy
if you kept written notes on what OS is on what partition.

You might need to use the 'makeactive' and 'hide' command in grub for
the older versions of Windows, since they assume they're the only OS
anyone would ever need and don't play well with others.  Earlier
Windows wants to run on C:, and you'll be making it's poor head hurt
with all these other partitions.

I've never actually installed more than one version of windows on a
system, so I'm not sure how it'd be handled.  It might be better to
have all the windows systems use the windows bootloader.

I have to agree with other posters that it might make sense to just
run them as virtual machines to eliminate all this complexity.

-- 
Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org>