at least triple boot

sinck@ugive.com sinck@ugive.com
Mon, 15 Jan 2001 13:05:49 -0700


\_ I have a case where I have to outfit my sales
\_ team with the abilty to boot from at least
\_ three of MS's current windows OS's.
\_ 
\_ It has been a looooooong time since I have done
\_ a dual boot (I use vmware, which will not work in this case),
\_ and was wondering if a small linux distro and allowing
\_ lilo to handle this would work.

My tri boot at home (which defaults to staring linux in <2 seconds) is
primarily under the NT boot loader:

NTBoot:
  linux (default)
  win95
  NT4

linux
  kernel-newish
  kernel-oldish
  dos (back to NTBoot)

The trick with the multiboot is to install the oses in bare minimal
mode and get the booting working before doing something silly like
installing M$ Office in 45 mins and discovering that you have to blow
it off.  :-)  Oh, and make C: or /dev/hda1 or whatever a nice
partition type that *all* your OSen can see & write too.  :-)

Basically, the nt4 bootloader is just interested in knowning where the
first 512 bytes or so are, so I strobe them from the appropriate
partition into a magic tickle file that boot.ini knows about, and all
is well and good.

Once you get the system set up, I'd immediately image the disk for the
other installs...hopefully all your hardware is the same.  (excuse me
why I die laughin').

Partition magic might have a cool off-the-shelf multiboot configurator
doodad.  Or was that system commander?

David