Hi everybody,

I want to have FreeBSD, Ubuntu, and XP Home Edition on one HD, what would be the best way to accomplish this, and what boot loader should I use? Grub, NTLDR?? Thank you to anyone who answers this question.

Hello,

I recently installed Fedora Core 4 alongside an existing installation of Windows XP. Here's what I did, maybe it can help:

1. I deleted a lot of stuff off my Windows partition to make space.
2. I used a DOS disk with a partition management tool on it to resize my Windows partition. It took a long time when it was moving files around.
3. I installed Fedora Core 4 in the free space (the installer made it painless). FC4 installed Grub for me, so I had a boot menu set up automatically.

Not quite what you're aiming for, but this is what I'd try:

1. If you have an existing Windows installation you want to use, resize the partition as above. You probably want about %50 of your disk for Windows because it's the Windows only stuff (like games) that take all the space.

OR

1. If you want to install Windows freshly, install it first and delete partitions as required in the installer, then create a new partition for Windows, leaving enough space on the disk for the other 2 OSes.

2. Install one of the Linuxes. I assume the installer will have options to create partitions for you. Remember to only use half of the remaining space.

3. Install the other one.

Pretty much all Linux installers will realise that people want to run it alongside Windows, so they should ALL install Grub, LILO, or similar.

I would be sure to install Windows first though, since it's boot loader might not be as smart as Grub, and earlier versions of Windows (95/98 etc) had to be on the first partition (as far as I know, I never tried otherwise).

Hope this helps,

Pete

One option is to have them all install their bootloader on their own partition only (WinXP has no such option and will toast the MBR - reinstall SBM after you load XP), and use "Smart bootmanager" to switch between them. It's pretty good.

Mark

Quote: Original post by ordered_disorder
Hi everybody,

I want to have FreeBSD, Ubuntu, and XP Home Edition on one HD, what would be the best way to accomplish this, and what boot loader should I use? Grub, NTLDR?? Thank you to anyone who answers this question.

I had XP, Archlinux and FreeBSD on my disk not too long ago, the way I did it was, install XP first, then partitianed the disk into 4 parts(1st for winXP, 2nd for Arch, 3rd for swap for Arch, 4th for FreeBSD) then installed Arch with grub, next I installed FreeBSD without a bootloader, and just added it to my boot.menu. Worked like a charm.

Hello ordered_disorder,

I'm not sure if this will suit your purposes, but I recently aquired a license to VMWare Desktop 5 and now I can boot up my usual Windows XP session and using VMWare I can create virtual desktops within XP.

With this I am currently running Suse Linux to test and play around with. So when I feel like it, I boot the Virtual machine and if I get bored/stuck, I can even pause the virtual machine and Alt-Tab back to Windows for a bit.

I've only been using it for two days and I have to say it's a great tool! You can install as many different OSs as you'd like, it's only tied down by the amount of diskspace you have.

Theoretically, if you were a programmer and you wanted to test your app on various platforms you could have a WinXP computer with VMWare, than virtual machines for Suse, Red Hat, Win XP (Another one), Win 2000, Win 98 and just switch them around when you need to test with them.

Check it out!

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Commando_337