Multi boot and partition recommendation needed

[vbportal]

Hi,
I would appreciate your views/recommendations on the following
setup (I unfortunatelly have no experience in this area
and reading the respective forums has not entirely
clarified things for me):

I have 3 HDs:
80GB 7200rpm fixed in PC case,80GB 7200rpm removable
and a 20GB 5400rpm removable and would like to have:
(a)a multiboot boot system (XP Home,XP Pro,Win2000,Linux,BSD
and perhaps Win95* and Win3.1* (*maybe not mandatory
as I have an older PC on which I can load this - if that creates
problems)
Note: I wrote "multi boot" but I was also thinking of
maybe not having all HDs active in each setup since
some HDs were removable/could be switched off.
The important thing would be the possibility of
accessing data produced by one OS environment
and using it in a nother.
(b)backup of complete OS,Applications etc


Could you please give me a recommendation on partitioning
(as well as reason/benefits) and any pointers on achieving
the setup.

Thanks,
Vjeko

 

[wolluf]

Your requirements are too complex for complete comment (and I have no experience with BSD).

1. Get a decent third party boot manager (I use ione at

http://www.boot-us.com,

free for personal use, which can handle all your o/s). Avoid XP and linux (Lilo & grub) based ones.

2. Find out where you can install each operating system (eg, I seem to remember some versions of Linux have to be on first disk) & then plan accordingly. Also find out what each o/s can read in terms of filestore.

3. When you've decided what's going where, how are you going to create partitions. And how much space each will need (eg win95 installs in less than 100MB, XP can take 1.5GB on initial install & Linux with 'everything' is pretty big).

4. Personal preference - only use primary partitions (you can have 4 per disk so you're ok)

5. To simplify matters, leave out win 3.1 (it may clash a bit with win95, depending which version of that you use)

6. Complete backup could start to get tricky! Probably something that can save partitions as images (eg, Ghost, DriveImage) with a CD writer or another large drive..

7. Use FAT32 filestore for all windows installations (I think Linux reads that nowadays - BSD?) - assuming win95 OSR2 - otherwise just use FAT for that.

Hope this is useful.

 

[purplesky]

install windows first and give it 1Gig. reboot and use windows diskmanager and set the rest of the disk space as Extended. grab some area of the exented for windows data and leave the rest free for linux and free BSD. By windows, of couse, I mean something like winnt and win2k; I have no exprience with XP yet.

Now boot the system using linux or BSD installation CD. linux and BSD will notice the partion table. Linux does not have to be in a primary partion. It is very happy with logical within extented. Then follow the linux fdisk and create logical partition by taking slices of extended partion and there you are. Remember BSD uses different way of partitioning. They call it slices. Using BSD fdisk grap a big enough slice, like 2 or 3 gig from the free space in extended partition and then when you proceed with BSD installation it would ask you to breakdown the slice into many mountable partition, like /, boot, /usr, etc.

windows have to be in the primary partition. Therefore if you want to install other windows flavors, you must install them before and linux and BSD.

Invest in a beginners linux book or look for linux newbies web site to get some insite. Athought this forum is a great place, you need to look in linux and bsd specific places, like "freebsd.org".


Following is a typical:

C: win2k primary 1
D: win95 primary 2
E: someother window Primary 3
G: Extended
H: logical for the first window
I: logical for the second window
J: logical for the third window
freespace:
hda6 linux swap
hda7 linux of some flavor
hda0 freebsd

There much more to say about multibooting. Good luck

I hope this starts you in searching somemore.

purplesky.

 

[crwpulsar]

I would install Win2000 first, on a clean install Linux will be able to partition the drive better.
Most Linux come with a GNU partition program so after you install win2000 put the linux disk in.During the installation it will give you the option to shrink the windows partition(windows defaults to the entire drive).
After this i would use partition magix to split the win200 drive into smaller drives where XP/XP pro etc etc can be installed.
Finally partition a scratch/temp as windows data can be read in linux but not vice versa so any info in your linux home dierectory will be inaccessible from windows.
have never used BSD so cant give any help.
One more thing is I have found with a few versions of Linux is the GNU partition is very unstable. The drive you are dividing MUST be clean and not fragmented at all!

hope this helps
David.

 

[richgill]

You could try using BOOTITNG from Terabyte Unlimited (

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com).

This is a boot and partition manager allowing many (>4) primary partitions. You can move & change the size of partitions, hide partitions, make image copies of partitions, boot into several OS's...etc etc. There is a trial version you can download.