Operating Systems: Partitioning

[cuckoo4]

Hi All,

I want to install various operating systems on my computer and needed to know the best way to do this. At the moment I'm running Windows XP, with an AMD Athlon 1900+ and 512MB of RAM.

Would it be best to buy a new hard drive and partition the disc space for each OS? I've heard of software like VMware and Virtual PC, but in the same breath heard they are CPU intensive and not worth it. Any advice is appreciated.

 

[smah]

You will probably get many responses about seperate drives/separate partitions, but either scenario will work eaqually well if you pay attention. You don't specify what OS's you'll be using but, in general, make sure you install you os's from oldest to newest. Win95, Win98, Win ME, WinNT, Win2k, WinXP, Linux. Let the installation do the formatting if possible.

 

[cuckoo4]

Thanks smah-

I want to install everything I can for a browser testing environment. I have XP loaded on drive C:, so I would probably just install 2000 on the new drive.

How could you install all of those systems on separate disks anyway? I did hear it's best to have separate hard disks for Win 2K and XP somewhere though.

 

[drdebit]

thread602-455381
is talking about how you can get a lot of separate hard drives in one system.

 

[wolluf]

Cuckoo4 - there are many options for multi/dual boot. If you just want 2k added to XP, additional drive would be best option (because otherwise you'd have to repartion your XP drive). XP & 2k live quite happily on the same drive by the way - as Smah says, doesn't really matter, separate drives or partitions).

Anyway - simple 2k/XP dual boot setup, with new drive.

1. Disconnect existing drive, connect new drive and boot PC from 2k install CD (might need to change boot order in bios - CD first). This will let you install 2k on the new drive.

2. When completed 1, reconnect XP drive (as master), so both connected. Boot into XP, and edit its boot.ini file so it looks something like this:-

[boot loader]
timeout=5
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINNT="Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect

You should now have menu with both XP and 2k, and it should boot either.

PS. You can have up to 4 primary partitions on a hard drive. Each one can have an indepenent operating system (so can get 8 on 2 drives). If they share a boot sector, you can also install o/s on logical 'drives' within an extended partition. I prefer to use a third party boot manager -

http://www.boot-us.com

(free for personal use).

http://www.xosl.org

is also free & there are many others (eg Partition Magic comes with one).