Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room
Multibooting and Partitioning Experiments
wolf.b:
I have been experimenting with partitioning my hard drive to be able to achieve these goals:
* multiple OS to choose from
* several instances of same OS to choose from
* have a drive with essential tools and data mapped to the same letter at all times
* write my own boot manager using batch files
* use hard disk backups for OS
After researching and reading what I could find I came to the following conclusions:
* I have to partition my hard drive and give each OS its own space. The is a very limited amount (4) of primary partitions that I can put inside the partition table of the master boot record. But I can put any number of logical drives inside an extended partition, given an large enough hard disk.
* Most (maybe all) OS for PC run well when they are installed on a logical drive and I boot from a matching DOS floppy. So I thought maybe they also run well when booting from a small primary DOS partition.
* In order to have access to a collection of essential tools (they are in a folder called TOOLS), I would have to copy that folder onto all of the floppies and primary partitions. That clearly is not possible because of lack of space and it would be a pain to maintain in case I update one of the tools or batches. So I have created an extended partition that contains a FAT16 logical drive and always shows up as D:.
Now I have a setup where
* C: is the only one of my primary partitions that gets mentioned in the MBR
* D: is the first (and always visible) logical drive and contains stuff that I consider essential. For me that is private data, DOS tools, and non-DOS tools that don't rely on being installed.
* E: is a logical drive where Windows operating systems (version >= 95) are installed. Only one of them is visible.
* F: contains a Setup folder where I keep installers for software.
* G: contains a Games folder and a Disks folder containing ISO images.
* H: contains a Backup folder for OS.
* This list is not complete but shows the organising of my hard disk.
I have used these tools to set up my system:
* Microsoft DOS (operating system)
* Ranish Partition Manager (partitioning tool)
* Powerquest Partition Magic (partitioning tool)
* Norton Ghost (imaging tool)
* JP soft 4DOS (powerful batch language)
* BREXX by Vassilis N. Vlachoudis (rexx extension to 4DOS batch language)
* Microsoft Debug (assembler extension to 4DOS batch language)
* Norton Commander (orthodox file manager for DOS)
* Volkov Commander (orthodox file manager for DOS)
* WBAT by Horst Schaeffer (dialogue boxes, menus and more for DOS)
Here is a pseudo screenshot:
The entire hard disk is represented in the 2nd row. Most space is occupied by the extended partition containing logical drives.
My reason for starting this thread is not to get anybody to do something similar. I just want to present my thoughts and experiments with multibooting and partitioning. This thread is a spin off of this thread: https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=10154.msg78404#msg78404, which I did not want to hijack. I feel I could write an awful lot more here, but the reading would become pretty boring, unless I write about specific topics that others are interested in. So I invite you all to share your experiments as well, and to ask about specific topics if you like. I don't claim expertise on anything, but I might be able to help. My main inspiration came from this website in 1999: The REAL Multi-boot -Trombettworks. It has been updated since I got my inspiration. Very useful tutorial, very technical in places, and very much in love with Ranish Partition Manager.
Greetings
Wolf
tomos:
Interesting read Wolf :up:
I've never indulged :) in multibooting,
but when setting up partitions & windows xp install lately
someone suggested making a hidden partition that I could possibly use later for multibooting (so I did)
also, these were recommended:
http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/index.htm
http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/notes.htm
and here is one partitioning guide I came across
http://partition.radified.com/partitioning_4.htm
I see you do have XP on a logical drive ?!?
Is it the boot.ini file going into the initial primary partitions that makes that okay?
Also curious about Ranish Partition Manager - it hasnt been updated in years,
is it good?
Do you have Powerquest Partition Magic because Ranish has limitations?
I see there's a few links about multibooting, etc at the ranish page:
http://www.ranish.com/part/
Multi-boot: Archer's HD Page, Multi-boot by Mariusz Zynel, Trombettworks Multi-boot HowTo
Hard disks: Boot Sequence, How-It-Works, Terms, Hidden Secrets, Recovering Secret HD Space!
Other apps: Bootpart, Diskman, GAG, OS Loader, SavePart, SBM, Volkov, Zeleps Partition Resizer
wolf.b:
Hi tomos,
do you miss Ireland? How do you cope with all those humor-free Germans (me included)? I am not spying on you but I have found your post whilst reading the thread "OK - lets get to know each other... who are you, what do you do, where from?". I might introduce myself properly over there as well, but not today.
Thank you for your links. I will read them after posting this.
Yes, XP is on a logical drive on my desktop computer (bought that when I was working in the UK). So is Win2000 on a virtual machine. I have two old laptops with Win98SE on a logical drive. I have never had any problems with that. Works like a charm. This is my boot.ini:
--- ---; BOOT.INI
; edited by Wolfgang Bernady
[Boot Loader]
TimeOut=5
;Default=C:\SECTOR\msdos622.bin
;Default=C:\SECTOR\msdos710.bin
;Default=C:\SECTOR\cmdcons.bin
;Default=C:\SECTOR\minint.bin
;Default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS
Default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(4)\WINDOWS
;Default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(5)\WINDOWS
[Operating Systems]
C:\SECTOR\floppy.bin = "Floppy A:"
C:\SECTOR\msdos622.bin = "MS DOS 6.22 (Win 3.11)"
C:\SECTOR\msdos710.bin = "MS DOS 7.10 (Win 98 SE)"
C:\SECTOR\cmdcons.bin = "XP Recovery Console" /cmdcons
C:\SECTOR\minint.bin = "XPE Mini Windows" /minint
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Pro (3)" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(4)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Pro (4)" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(5)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Pro (5)" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
The three entries for XP are actually all the same installation. I have added them for convenience. When I make two or three primary partitions visible the number needs to change. Right now minint.bin is just a non functional dummy, but floppy.bin will read the floppy boot sector and boot from A: drive, although my BIOS setup will check for HDD only. So even with a boot floppy inserted, the computer boots from the hard disk.
Ranish Partition Manager is good for studying and I regard it as an essential in my TOOLS collection. I also have a floppy without DOS that runs RPM. It starts very fast!!! But it sure has a learning curve. And a lot of features that are missing can be found in Powerquest Partition Magic, such as a graphical user interface with mouse support. On the other hand, RPM allows me to do things that PPM can not do. So I would have to use Powerquest's Partition Table Editor, to do the REAL multi booting thing. At the end of the day two tools are needed and I am used to RPM. Another thing is that PPM + PTedit together don't fit on a bootable DOS floppy, which has io.sys and command.com. Maybe I should try and compress some of those files. But because I have USB boot support on my desktop, I don't really need to do that. And PTedit will not boot from a floppy in under 5 seconds. Unfortunately there is no single application that does it all for me, and I use all three of them. PTedit even works under WinXP when I want to manually mess up the running system. :-*
Greetings
Wolf
iphigenie:
I have indulged in multi boot and the safer thing is indeed to have one partition per OS
Actually even when I only have 1 OS on a computer I have kept the habit of doing one small partition (about 3gb for xp) for the OS, software/games/data on other partitions.
But when you have multiple OSes it makes even more sense as you can then
- hide each OS's main partition from each other
- share apps and data
Back in the days I had OS/2, Win3 (later XP) and a linux. Nowadays it tends to be one or two windows, the occasional linux (with wine to access some windows apps) or bsd.
Obviously you can do something more clever with virtualisation and/or image tools like FirstDefense - no messing with partitions, just run whatever image you want on top of the same data and app folders. That's what I really want to try next, although it is a lot more work to set up than just installing in parallel.
Carol Haynes:
I used to indulge in lots of multiboot options (don't at the moment though). At one time I have 5 versions of Windows on my system (Win 98, Win 2k and 3 x Win XP) plus SUSE Linux.
Best advise if you want multiple Windows installations, without resorting to proprietary boot managers, is install them in order of release so that each version is "aware" of the versions already on your system, they will then install an multiboot quite happily. Win 98 only works if it is installed within 8Gb of the start of the first block of a hard disk and on a primary partition (though some boot loaders can overcome these restrictions) but Win 2k onwards can be installed in any partition. Don't forget if you want to share data with Win 98 and older versions of Windows you will need to use FAT32 partitions as they can't read NTFS natively (though I think there were some drivers about - though whether they are still available and how well they work I don't know)
It's not quite true that you need to install on separate partitions - so long as you don't allow multiple versions of windows to use C:\Windows and C:\Program Files (you can select alternates during installation) there isn't any real reason why you can't install everything on the C: drive. Having said that why would you want to?
I found when I had Windows and Linux mixed it was best to install all the Windows stuff first and then install Linux with GRUB last. That way you could use GRUB to go to the normal Windows Boot screen if you wanted to select from multiple Windows installations.
Not sure how Vista has affected all this.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
Go to full version