MULTI-BOOTING

[Guest]

I apologise if my comment is located incorrectly but this is my first time.
I have five partitions and five different Windows installation CD's. Windows
95, Windows 98 SE, Windows 2000 Pro, Windows XP Pro and Windows Vista Home
Basic. I would welcome step by step guidance on the best way to proceed
installing these five Operating Systems so that everything runs smoothly.
Only two of my partitions are currently active. Windows XP Pro one one and
Windows Vista HB on the other. Is there any way to achieve my goal without
disturbing these existing installations. Not sure if its relevant, but I
also have MS Virtual PC running within the XP and I am currently running 98
and 2000 on the Virtual.

Any help/advice would be much appreciated. Thank you. (e-mail address removed)

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

I apologise if my comment is located incorrectly but this is my first time.
I have five partitions and five different Windows installation CD's. Windows
95, Windows 98 SE, Windows 2000 Pro, Windows XP Pro and Windows Vista Home
Basic. I would welcome step by step guidance on the best way to proceed
installing these five Operating Systems so that everything runs smoothly.
Only two of my partitions are currently active. Windows XP Pro one one and
Windows Vista HB on the other. Is there any way to achieve my goal without
disturbing these existing installations. Not sure if its relevant, but I
also have MS Virtual PC running within the XP and I am currently running 98
and 2000 on the Virtual.

I personally have very little experience with multi=booting, so I
won't try to answer your question, and leave it for someone who knows
more about it than I do.

But I have a question for you. Why do you want/need to run five
different versions of Windows, especially five that span so many
years?

Just curious.

 

[Bert Kinney]

Hi Jim,

I would suggest sticking with MS VPC. Was this system built for Vista? If,
you could install Virtual PC 2007 onto Vista and run all the other OS's from
there.

You will also want to be aware of the following issues when dual booting
Windows Vista & Windows XP:
http://bertk.mvps.org/html/dualboot.html

Regards,
Bert Kinney MS-MVP Shell/User
http://bertk.mvps.org
Member: http://dts-l.org

 

[Timothy Daniels]

I have five partitions and five different Windows installation CD's.
Windows 95, Windows 98 SE, Windows 2000 Pro,
Windows XP Pro and Windows Vista Home Basic.
I would welcome step by step guidance on the best way to proceed
installing these five Operating Systems so that everything runs smoothly.
Only two of my partitions are currently active. Windows XP Pro one
one and Windows Vista HB on the other. Is there any way to achieve
my goal without disturbing these existing installations. Not sure if its
relevant, but I also have MS Virtual PC running within the XP and I
am currently running 98 and 2000 on the Virtual.

Any help/advice would be much appreciated.
Thank you. (e-mail address removed)

These OSes span 3 different boot managers, and the latest
OSes have already been installed - the opposite of the way
Microsoft recommends and documents, since MS says to
start with the installation of the earliest OS and install in
chronological order of their release dates. To work back to
the Win95 installation without disturbing the Vista and XP
installations would require lots of experience and patience
and a poster who has gobs of time on his hands to explain
how to do it. Since the computer apparently has the power
to run Virtual PC satisfactorily, I'd go with the advice of others
and run the earlier ones under Virtual PC. The other
practical alternative is to re-install all the OSes, starting with
Win95 and working forward to Vista.

BTW, you have just submitted your email address for
spamming, as spammers have software that automatically
harvest email address from newsgroup postings.

*TimDaniels*

 

[C.Joseph Drayton]

I personally have very little experience with multi=booting, so I
won't try to answer your question, and leave it for someone who knows
more about it than I do.

But I have a question for you. Why do you want/need to run five
different versions of Windows, especially five that span so many
years?

Just curious.

Hi Ken,

I am not the OP, but I can tell you why I run so many
operating system (I'm also running MS-DOS / Win 3.11 and
WindowsME). I am a database developer, and I write Windows
GUI based databases that will run on Windows 3.11 and
higher. Because of changes that have been made in Windows
over the years, I like to make sure that my applications
will in fact work under all Windows.

The reason I make my applications work with all versions of
Windows, is because I have begun working with medium size
businesses that often have patch-quilted their systems
together over the years. They don't want to buy new machines
and OSes if the old ones will do the job.

Ciao . . . C.Joseph

"A promise is nothing more than an attempt,
to respond to an unreasonable request."

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

Hi Ken,

I am not the OP, but I can tell you why I run so many
operating system (I'm also running MS-DOS / Win 3.11 and
WindowsME). I am a database developer, and I write Windows
GUI based databases that will run on Windows 3.11 and
higher. Because of changes that have been made in Windows
over the years, I like to make sure that my applications
will in fact work under all Windows.

The reason I make my applications work with all versions of
Windows, is because I have begun working with medium size
businesses that often have patch-quilted their systems
together over the years. They don't want to buy new machines
and OSes if the old ones will do the job.

Ciao . . . C.Joseph

Thanks, and I understand.

 

[Matt]

The Virtual PC route is one that you should really consider, or perhaps
VMWare. VMWare server is free for non commercial use.

I multiboot 3 operating systems on my machine (Win XP, Vista and Ubuntu)
the best boot manager I ever used is this: http://www.bootitng.com/

You'll need to read through the docs carefully to achieve such a exotic
setup as this, but it is possible. I used to boot Win 98 with it but I
just use VMware now.

These OSes span 3 different boot managers, and the latest
OSes have already been installed - the opposite of the way
Microsoft recommends and documents, since MS says to
start with the installation of the earliest OS and install in
chronological order of their release dates. To work back to
the Win95 installation without disturbing the Vista and XP
installations would require lots of experience and patience
and a poster who has gobs of time on his hands to explain
how to do it. Since the computer apparently has the power
to run Virtual PC satisfactorily, I'd go with the advice of others
and run the earlier ones under Virtual PC. The other
practical alternative is to re-install all the OSes, starting with
Win95 and working forward to Vista.

BTW, you have just submitted your email address for
spamming, as spammers have software that automatically
harvest email address from newsgroup postings.

*TimDaniels*

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