does anyone use a Quad boot?

[AmdMELTDOWN]

A quad boot meaning, NT, linux, win98 and 2000?

I'm thinking of upgrading to 2000, will this work with-out pulling out my hair?

thank in advance.

 

[hypnotic_kumquat]

Well, I haven't installed Linux on my new setup YET, so I don't have any non-ntfs/fatXX partitions, but I've got 45GB & 6.5GB drives setup running 98, NT4 Server, 2000 Pro, & 2000 Adv. Server. (That boot menu does look pretty neat.) I left room for linux but haven't had time to get it running yet. 2000 was cake installing & no hair loss.

It did take me 2 tries to get all the pri & extended partitions & associated drives laid out correctly, since MS's workarounds to get NT4 running on a large drive didn't work for me.

"Let's take the warning labels off everything and let natural selection clean the gene pool!"

 

[Guest]

my workaround for NT4 on a big disk is to create only your boot partition, and no bigger than 4000MB. Use Partition Magic later

 

[hypnotic_kumquat]

I wanted to put nt4 about 7GB down in the drive (after 98.) I didn't have PM, and I heard that 98 doesn't always coexist well when an ntfs partition is the first logical drive in an extended partition. I even went so far as to do the Q243896 runaround doing the dual NT install and using the SP4 atapi.sys. :frown: STILL didn't work.

So I said screw it and installed it on my second drive!

"Let's take the warning labels off everything and let natural selection clean the gene pool!"

 

[Guest]

hmmmmmm

4GB NTFS + 4GB FAT32 (in that order) did it for me when I had my old 8GB hard drive...

 

[DSutcliffe]

I currently triple-boot my system at work:

Partition 1 = >2GB Win98 FAT32
Partition 2 = 8GB Extended Partion Broken into Logical drives:

3GB NTFS w/ NT4.0
2GB FAT16 no OS (Data storage for both Win98 and WinNT)
2GB NTFS w/ Win2k
500MB NTFS swap file partition for both WINNT and WIN2k.

I used Boot Magic installed the Win98 partition to boot between Win98 and WinNT.

If I choose Win98, I boot strait to Win98. If I choose WinNT, I get the NT Boot manager asking if I want Win2k or WinNT 4.0.

The important process through this whole thing is that the boot partition for Win98 cannot be past 2GB (hence the >2GB reference above) into the drive or it will not work.

That's all I've got for now sorry I don't know how to add Linux to this setup but maybe you can with this knowledge.

T-Bird 800Mhz
2X IBM 75GXP 30GB in RAID0 config
Geforce2 32MB
SB Live

 

[Guest]

I haven`t tryed this, but:
1. partition to fat32 (win98/ME)
2. partiton for NT
3. partition for W2k
4. partiton(s) for linux, during installation of linux specify bootable partitions (first as win98, secound as NT, third as w2k, and linux boot partition) for lilo (linux loader). LiLo is a good choice for a bootmanager/menu

If you install anything after Linux you have to rebuid Lilo, so I recommend this order...

I don`t know why it shouldn`t work...

And they said schizophrenia is annoying?

 

[HolyGrenade]

You can only have four primary partitions per HDD.
Or you can have three primary partitions + the extended one with as many logical partitions within as necessary.

So there might not be enough space for a seperate boot manager partition, if you wanna use any advanced boot manager.

Also, I'm not sure but you might need to hide the NT partition while installing 2k.

...Don't the people in the software sections seem so much...not hostile, compared to the hardware section people...

"2 is not equal to 3, not even for large values of 2"

 

[hypnotic_kumquat]

Right-o. Watch out for the primary partition limit. If you're going to run a few MS OS's & linux, boot linux from floppy. It'll be a bit easier. FWIW, here's how I'm running my quad-boot. Disk0 - 45GB IDE0, Disk1 - 6.4 GB IDE1.

Disk0:
Partition 1(Primary/Active) 550MB FAT16 - W2K Boot, loader/system partition, NT4 pagefile
Partition 2(Extended1) 6.5GB FAT32 - Win98 boot volume
Partition 3(Extended2) 10GB NTFS - W2K Pro boot volume
Partition 4(Extended3) 10GB NTFS - W2K Server boot volume
6GB Unallocated (Linux future?)

Disk1:
Partition 1(Primary1) 550MB FAT16 - Win98 page file
Partition 2(Extended1) 3GB NTFS - NT4 server boot volume
Partition 3(Extended2) 600MB NTFS - W2K Pro/Server page file
2GB Unallocated (Linux future?)

-hyp

"Let's take the warning labels off everything and let natural selection clean the gene pool!"

 

[Guest]

I have installed three OS's as follows:

First primary partition - 2GB NTFS - NT 4 OS
Second primary partition - 2GB FAT16 - Win98SE
Third primary partition - 5GB FAT32 - Win98SE

The extended ("forth primary") contains:
2GB FAT16 "Transfer" to get data from one OS to another.
2GB NTFS "Paging" for NT to page to (I need a 1GB page file).
28GB NTFS "Data"
2GB NTFS *HIDDEN* copy of NT OS partition.
2GB FAT16 *HIDDEN* copy of Win98SE OS partition.

I installed NT first, then installed Partition Magic 6 and created the first Win98SE partition and set it active.

I installed the first Win98SE.

When I got both fully configured with the drivers for all the devices and some minor software (IE5.5, Acrobat reader etc) I then used PM to copy the partition and convert it to a logical partition.

Now when the OS gets polluted with broken demos etc I just unhide the partition and either copy the contents to the original (using the other OS) or copy the entire partition (using PM). (I also WinZipped to .exe and burned to CD as backup - thus avoided setting several thousand OS files to read only. If you simply burn the native files to CD and try to copy back the OS won't work because all the files are read only).

I found the performance of NT degraded over time (I've been using NT for four years). Also the first Win98 is solely used for the internet and email. The second Win98 (copied the first Win98, converted to FAT32 and resized to 5GB using PM) is for games and when corrupted can be overwritten.

Some lessons learned:

Don't whatever you do use Windows NT Disk Adminstrator on a hard drive you are using PM on. NT DA works great on its own but the two softwares fight over the master boot record and can leave the disk corrupt.

When you have your OS partitions set up (switching between them by using either PM or creating DOS bootable PM floppies) then install Boot Magic *ON ONE OS ONLY*. If this is done on the OS you want to default to everything is configured automatically.

In order for PM to copy a primary partition to a logical one there must be a "free" primary position to copy the partition to before its converted to logical. If you already have used four primaries or 3 and one extended the software will abort the operation with no explaination (took me a while to figure that one out).

Although the PM advertising says you can install dozens of OS's it does not give any indication as to how many can be installed on a single hard drive. There are numerous hard drive limitations, 1024 cylinder limit, 8GB bootable limit, nearly all OS's must be installed on a primary partition (4 max.) etc. Perhaps Linux or some other OS can be installed on a logical partition but nearly all others can't. Theoretically NT can be booted from a tiny primary (where NTDetect etc reside) and the remaining 99% of the OS installed on a logical partition but I didn't have much luck with this. Even though my second Win98 partition goes beyond the 8GB limit it works fine - possibly because the OS resides in the lower 4GB of that partition. The NT partition is within the first 2GB's of the hard drive also.

This setup protects my NT software and data (both on NTFS partitions) from the internet. Ideally I would like to have the data on a second physical hard drive to avoid any nasty MBR errors.

You can use a DOS bootable floppy with FDISK on it to create and set active the first partition only. Alternatively you can use the NT installation to create the partition. Either works but I wouldn't use FDISK after you have installed and used PM. Also, FDISK can't create and set active/hide all the primaries I needed (or atleast my DOS 6.22 version couldn't).

Label the volumes with obvious names because each OS assigns drive letters differently. Win98 drive letter assignment is dynamic and will change as you create partitions. NT drive letter assignment is permanent. Obvious volume labels are imparitive if you are going to keep everything straight in your head (for example under Win98 the TRANSFER partition is D and under NT its something else).

So far everything is great. With the OS's installed in this order every OS assigns drive letter "C" to the OS partition (nice).

Gumby7