Three Hard Drives, tripple booting

[ik_ool]

I have XP 32-bit installed in my HDD. I plan on buying 2 more HDD, and I wanna install Vista Ultimate 64-bit in one, and Ubuntu 8.04 64-bit in the other, and do a tipple boot. Is it possible?
My specs are:
Processor: Q6600 (stock clock speed)
VGA: ATI X1600 PRO
HDD: 500GB WD SATA
RAM: 2 GB DDR2 single channel (i have another 2 GB, but had to take it out)
Motherboard: MSI P35 Platinum

also, XP 32-bit was very unstable with 4 Gigs of ram. It kept restarting randomly and kept saying "PAGE FAULT IN NON-PAGED AREA". so I had to take out 2 GB. Is it possible to disable 2 GB only when XP is running, or do I have to take out the 2 GB every time use XP?

 

[halcyon]

Nothing wrong with dual, or in your case, tripple booting. ...but its 2008, why not just virtualize? You could install the rock solid Vista 64 and use VMWare to install XP 32 and Ubunto in Virtual machines. Given enough RAM (6+GB) you could even run them simultaneously and network them together. Performance? You can assign each machine up to 2 processor cores so that it sees and can use two processor cores. You don't have 3D gaming performance in the virtual machines, however, so if that's what you really need then tripple booting would still the best solution to you.

...but VMware is so...elegant and powerful.

...and no, you can't disable 2GB of RAM in XP while the who enchilada is available to the other OS'. You've gotta find out why your XP 32-bit install is choking with 4GB in. Try this. Try totally turning off your page file, set it to 0. Don't worry, with 4GB (really 3+GB in 32-bit) XP won't miss the page file.

 

[ik_ool]

I was thinking about using MokaFive Express and building a Windows XP Live PC.... but will it be able to run Office 2007, Access 2003 and Visual Basic 6?
thanks for your help...

 

[halcyon]

I was thinking about using MokaFive Express and building a Windows XP Live PC.... but will it be able to run Office 2007, Access 2003 and Visual Basic 6?
thanks for your help...

I'm not familiar with MokaFive, besides what I've just read, but if its anything like VMWare, you can do anything you'd do on a stand-alone PC besides using 3D hardware. You should be able to run Office, Access, and Visual Basic 6 with more than enough power, just like on a stand-alone PC.

Even if you're using a dual-core you should still find it very robust, I'd think. Heck, even Microsoft's own Virtual PC that can't give the guest OS use of multiple processors runs very well on a dual-core machine. Virtualization is really a powerful tool, often overlooked by many enthusiasts.

 

[invalidka]

I have XP 32-bit installed in my HDD. I plan on buying 2 more HDD, and I wanna install Vista Ultimate 64-bit in one, and Ubuntu 8.04 64-bit in the other, and do a tipple boot. Is it possible?

Its possible, but you can also just make several partitions on one HDD and install all three of them. I cant imagine why you would need a whole HDD for Ubuntu. I would say the most you will need for it is 10-20Gb, and I dont think you will be using it for media storage. I'd say put Vista64 on one HDD and XP+Ubuntu on another.