Triple boot

[scbs29]

Hello all
At present I dual boot Win XP SP3 and PCLinuxOS Gnome.
My disk setup is
Internal 250 Gb master set up as 133 Gb for XP and the rest for
storage of files etc, both NTFS
Internal 200 Gb slave set up as a logical partition with partitions 12
GB /, 4 Gb swap, 64 GB /home, all ext3, and the rest as NTFS primary
partition for more storage of files etc.
Boot up is taken care of by Grub, when I can select booting into XP or
PCLinuxOS.

I would like to triple boot with what I have now and with Windows
2000.
Would it be feasible to do as follows :
Create a new partition on the master hdd, either by shrinking WinXP or
the storage area, and install Win2000 to this. I would assume that
this would overwrite the mbr and would thus only boot Win2000. If this
is the case, could the mbr be reset from the PCLos live CD to pick up
XP, 2000 and PCLos and allow booting to either of these ?
At present I use Win2000 in a virtual machine within VirtualBox, but
this is not really satisfactory, which is why I would like to boot
2000 on the hdd.
I do not want to have to wipe the hdd and reinstall everything.
Any advice gratefully received.
Not sure if I require Linux or Windows advice, so am posting it to
both.


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[boatman312]

Hello all
At present I dual boot Win XP SP3 and PCLinuxOS Gnome.
My disk setup is
Internal 250 Gb master set up as 133 Gb for XP and the rest for
storage of files etc, both NTFS
Internal 200 Gb slave set up as a logical partition with partitions 12
GB /, 4 Gb swap, 64 GB /home, all ext3, and the rest as NTFS primary
partition for more storage of files etc.
Boot up is taken care of by Grub, when I can select booting into XP or
PCLinuxOS.

I would like to triple boot with what I have now and with Windows
2000.
Would it be feasible to do as follows :
Create a new partition on the master hdd, either by shrinking WinXP or
the storage area, and install Win2000 to this. I would assume that
this would overwrite the mbr and would thus only boot Win2000. If this
is the case, could the mbr be reset from the PCLos live CD to pick up
XP, 2000 and PCLos and allow booting to either of these ?
At present I use Win2000 in a virtual machine within VirtualBox, but
this is not really satisfactory, which is why I would like to boot
2000 on the hdd.
I do not want to have to wipe the hdd and reinstall everything.
Any advice gratefully received.
Not sure if I require Linux or Windows advice, so am posting it to
both.


remove fred before emailing
Registered Linux User 490858

How about installing Virtualbox or VMWare in one or both current OS's?
Then, you'd have Win2K available without a new boot process.

 

[BillW50]

In scbs29 typed on Thu, 13 Jan 2011 15:31:06 +0000:

Hello all
At present I dual boot Win XP SP3 and PCLinuxOS Gnome.
My disk setup is
Internal 250 Gb master set up as 133 Gb for XP and the rest for
storage of files etc, both NTFS
Internal 200 Gb slave set up as a logical partition with partitions 12
GB /, 4 Gb swap, 64 GB /home, all ext3, and the rest as NTFS primary
partition for more storage of files etc.
Boot up is taken care of by Grub, when I can select booting into XP or
PCLinuxOS.

I would like to triple boot with what I have now and with Windows
2000.
Would it be feasible to do as follows :
Create a new partition on the master hdd, either by shrinking WinXP or
the storage area, and install Win2000 to this. I would assume that
this would overwrite the mbr and would thus only boot Win2000. If this
is the case, could the mbr be reset from the PCLos live CD to pick up
XP, 2000 and PCLos and allow booting to either of these ?
At present I use Win2000 in a virtual machine within VirtualBox, but
this is not really satisfactory, which is why I would like to boot
2000 on the hdd.
I do not want to have to wipe the hdd and reinstall everything.
Any advice gratefully received.
Not sure if I require Linux or Windows advice, so am posting it to
both.

Yup, all of your conclusions are indeed correct. And if you install
Windows 2000 with Linux and Windows XP, it will hose your MBR and the
only thing that will boot is Windows 2000. Although if one did do this,
it is still fixable.

Although in your case, I believe the best plan for you (not me
personally) is to use one of those boot managers. There are lots of them
out there that others could recommend. Most of them rewrite the MBR
anyway and it doesn't matter if Windows 2000 rewrites it or not.

And a word of warning about resizing and creating a new partition for
Windows 2000. Speaking solely about Windows XP only, you could break the
info stored in the boot.ini file. This is easy to fix though if you do.
As boot.ini tells the booting process which drive and partition XP is
installed in. And putting the Windows 2000 partition anywhere before
Windows XP will break boot.ini.

 

[Chris Whelan]

On Thu, 13 Jan 2011 11:06:09 -0500, boatman312 wrote:

[...]

How about installing Virtualbox or VMWare in one or both current OS's?
Then, you'd have Win2K available without a new boot process.

From the OP:

"At present I use Win2000 in a virtual
machine within VirtualBox, but this is not really satisfactory"

Chris

 

[Magnus]

Hello all
At present I dual boot Win XP SP3 and PCLinuxOS Gnome.
My disk setup is
Internal 250 Gb master set up as 133 Gb for XP and the rest for
storage of files etc, both NTFS
Internal 200 Gb slave set up as a logical partition with partitions 12
GB /, 4 Gb swap, 64 GB /home, all ext3, and the rest as NTFS primary
partition for more storage of files etc.
Boot up is taken care of by Grub, when I can select booting into XP or
PCLinuxOS.

I would like to triple boot with what I have now and with Windows
2000.
Would it be feasible to do as follows :
Create a new partition on the master hdd, either by shrinking WinXP or
the storage area, and install Win2000 to this. I would assume that
this would overwrite the mbr and would thus only boot Win2000. If this
is the case, could the mbr be reset from the PCLos live CD to pick up
XP, 2000 and PCLos and allow booting to either of these ?
At present I use Win2000 in a virtual machine within VirtualBox, but
this is not really satisfactory, which is why I would like to boot
2000 on the hdd.
I do not want to have to wipe the hdd and reinstall everything.
Any advice gratefully received.
Not sure if I require Linux or Windows advice, so am posting it to
both.

Go here...
http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1

Install from XP. Keep PCLOS grub on its partition. Once you've got that
working (XP + PCLOS), save a copy of your mbr and install 2000. Reload
the mbr and go into XP/EasyBCD and setup 2000.

There's help on the NeoSmart forums...

 

[philo]

Hello all
At present I dual boot Win XP SP3 and PCLinuxOS Gnome.
My disk setup is
Internal 250 Gb master set up as 133 Gb for XP and the rest for
storage of files etc, both NTFS
Internal 200 Gb slave set up as a logical partition with partitions 12
GB /, 4 Gb swap, 64 GB /home, all ext3, and the rest as NTFS primary
partition for more storage of files etc.
Boot up is taken care of by Grub, when I can select booting into XP or
PCLinuxOS.

I would like to triple boot with what I have now and with Windows
2000.

<snip>

I can not imagine why one would need to run win2k and XP

 

[unruh]

["Followup-To:" header set to alt.os.linux.pclinuxos.]

Yes.

Probably also WinXP.

Yes.

Many ways. Eg mount the / partition of PCLos somewhere, edit the grub
file, do a chroot to whereever you mounted that / partition and run
grub. (I do not use grub so treat the above with caution).

 

[unruh]

In scbs29 typed on Thu, 13 Jan 2011 15:31:06 +0000:

Yup, all of your conclusions are indeed correct. And if you install
Windows 2000 with Linux and Windows XP, it will hose your MBR and the
only thing that will boot is Windows 2000. Although if one did do this,
it is still fixable.

Although in your case, I believe the best plan for you (not me
personally) is to use one of those boot managers. There are lots of them

Sure. It is called grub. It is a boot manager that will handle all of
those OS.
Another one is called lilo. Somewhat more primative but it works well.

 

[Tester]

I would like to triple boot with what I have now and with Windows
2000.

Why? What is in Windows 2000 that is not in Windows XP? There is
absolutely no point in wasting any time on Windows 2000 if you already
have Windows XP and your system is capable of running XP without much
"strain"!!

If you are doing for fun (I am of course assuming you are one of those
jobless kids) then you will need to partition your HD into 4 parts:

1) First for Windows 2000;
2) Then second for Windows XP;
3) Then third for that crap OS;
4) Final for your data.

Also, install the Oss in above order to avoid any problems and further
messing around.

hth
Ps: In future please don't cross post messages in newsgroups because
news carriers don't allow cross postings when we reply.

 

[scbs29]

Why? What is in Windows 2000 that is not in Windows XP? There is
absolutely no point in wasting any time on Windows 2000 if you already
have Windows XP and your system is capable of running XP without much
"strain"!!

If you are doing for fun (I am of course assuming you are one of those
jobless kids) then you will need to partition your HD into 4 parts:

1) First for Windows 2000;
2) Then second for Windows XP;
3) Then third for that crap OS;
4) Final for your data.

Also, install the Oss in above order to avoid any problems and further
messing around.

hth
Ps: In future please don't cross post messages in newsgroups because
news carriers don't allow cross postings when we reply.

Thankyou for the advice
Tester - I am not a jobless kid, I am retired after 25 years as a
computer programmer (IBM Mainframes, Silicon Graphics workstations,
etc) preceded by 20 years as a graduate metallurgist, Chartered
Engineer etc.
I want to do it purely for my own amusement. Why shouldn't I ?
Fair enough about the cross posting - mea culpa.


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