Dual-booting for fun and profit

[sticky52]

Is there an end-all boot utility for multiple operating systems or is Grub good enough?

Visual Studio 2003 pushed my main box off the deep-end and it's time for a rebuild. I'd like to run multiple OS's and hate the performance of VMWare. Win98SE, WinXP and RedHat 9 all running on seperate partitions is what I'd like, and was going to install them in that order using Grub to choose between them at bootup. WinXP-64 would be fun to play with too, but I'm not sure how to get it to play nice with an already installed WinXP Pro. If it's relevant at all, the machine in question is an Athlon64-2Ghz, 1GB RAM, striped pair of SATA 36GB drives.

Is there a better way? How is your multi-OS machine setup?

 

[GigaCluster]

Grub is good enough, but the most intuitive and "end-all" boot utility that I've used was System Commander.

 

[skene]

Grub should be able to do what you want. I've got win xp and 3 linux distros on my comp right now and have no problem switching between them with grub. You do have to be a bit careful when installing grub since it's fairly easy to make your windows install non-bootable if it's the first partition.

 

[sticky52]

I remember using System Commander back in the day and it was fine, but is it still supported? Would it try to divide by zero if I put XP-64 on it?

As for Grub, that should be the last one I install, right? So an order of Win98SE-WinXP-XP64-RedHat9 would be the way to go?

 

[SUOrangeman]

I use NT Loader (yes, the default NT/2K/XP/2K3 boot loader) for my six OSes (4 Win, 2 *NIX). With a little care and planning you can add grub (and FreeBSD's loader) to the NT loader menu.

WinImage's bootpart (www.winimage.com -> bootpart) can make using NT Loader a little easier.

www.xosl.org is also another good, free boot manager.

-SUO

 

[artemedes]

I like XOSL.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: sticky52
I remember using System Commander back in the day and it was fine, but is it still supported? Would it try to divide by zero if I put XP-64 on it?

Newest version of System Commander claims suppport for Longhorn, even though it hasn't even been officially released.

It does require a small primary FAT partition at the front of the drive though, I believe.

I run pretty-much only FAT32 here, and have Win98se, W2K, XP, and some others, all using MS's bootloader binaries that reside in the first primary FAT32 partitions. Haven't install Linux onto here (again) yet.

 

[Basie]

In my experience I have found that Grub works fine. I have a dual boot WinXP/ME with 8 Linux Distros
and I deleted and added and played with them in various order. Just simply a matter of copy and paste
into the Main Grub.conf or Menu.lst The one thing I caution is that when you do add or delete a Primary
partition you have to make the change in Boot.ini or XP will not boot and you will get a Hal.dll error. Just change the number in parenthesis up or down depending on which way you go.
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(4)