Ram said:
hi,
I wanted to load three opeerating systems on my system on single
machine on differnt drives. I have already loaded Windows98 and windows 2000
server, now i want to load windows professional too on my system. Is it
possible...Do i need to take any precautions for it. Just let me know is it
advisable...if its possible them do let me know the precautions to be taken.
Thanks
Rama
It's both possible and easily done.
The simplest way I've found to multi-boot between Win9x/Me, Win2K &
WinXP would be to partition your drive roughly as follows:
Primary Partition:
C: FAT32 Win9x
Extended Partition:
1st Logical Drive D: NTFS Win2K
2nd Logical Drive E: NTFS WinXP
Adjust the partition sizes according to your actual hard drive(s)
size and the amount of space you'd like to allocate to each OS and its
applications.
Create the partitions using Win9x's FDISK so you can enable large
disk support (FAT32). (No need for 3rd party partitioning
utilities/boot managers and their occasional complications.) You need
only format the Win9x partition at this time, the Win2K/XP installations
can format their own respective partitions as part of their setup routines.
Install Win9x first, being sure to select "C:\Windows" when asked
for the default Windows directory. When you subsequently install
Win2K/XP, be sure to specify "D:\Winnt" and E:\Windows," as
preferred/applicable) when asked for the default Windows directory, to
place them on the other partitions. The Win2K/XP installation routines
will automatically set up the Multi-boot menu for you. The default
settings for this menu can be readily edited from within Win2K/XP.
This method can be adapted to using 2 physical hard drives by
placing the boot partition (C:, which still must be FAT32) and either of
the operating systems on the Primary Master hard drive, and the second
and/or third operating system(s) on the second hard drive. Just remember
to keep each OS in its own partition.
It is also possible to have a 4th partition for shared
applications, but it would be necessary for such a partition to be
formatted in the common file format (FAT32). The applications would
also have to be installed into each OS (to ensure proper system file
placement and registry updates), one at a time, but the bulk of the
program files could be located on this common partition. I do not,
however, actually recommend doing this as, if you were to uninstall such
an application from one OS, you may not be able to gracefully uninstall
it from the second/third OS, having already deleted crucial installation
data during the first uninstall action.
Just about everything you need to know (URLs may wrap):
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/techinfo/administration/management/mltiboot.asp
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/using/howto/gettingstarted/multiboot.asp
--
Bruce Chambers
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