A good partition scheme for a triple boot?

Steveire

I posted [thread=2054927983]this[/thread] on the unix board, but maybe I'll get some more coverage here.

I think if I can reorganise my partition table to have a primary partition for XP and one for FreeBSD, I can put everything else in logical partitions. Is that reasonable to say? Can I run linux in a logical partition? I was thinking of making a boot partition too, so any thoughts on that are welcome too.

Can I move partitions like that and preserve the data? (I will backup of course)

Post your own partition tables too if you've put any thought into doing them. I'm quite new to partitioning, so examples is what I need now I think.

Here's my current one:

steveire@ubuntu:~$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/hda

Disk /dev/hda: 40.0 GB, 40060403712 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4870 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1        1555    12490506    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2            1556        2321     6152895    c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/hda3            2322        4789    19824210   83  Linux
/dev/hda4            4790        4870      650632+   5  Extended
/dev/hda5            4790        4870      650601   82  Linux swap / Solaris

Steveire

bump

melekalikimaka

i'm also curious, I can't get duel booting right on my lappy dammit. I think linux can run on a logical tho

Steveire

I still haven't found any help on this. The millions of results that I get from google are about dual booting with XP/Linux or similar. I'm already doing that though, and I can't find more general resources for partitioning.

I have convinced myself that I can install linux on a logical partition.

If I make a boot partition, is it as simple as installing grub on that and *magic* it will find my 3 OSes? Can the boot partition be a logical partition?

I don't know if this is a practical approach, but the way I imagine it working is I have XP and FreeBSD on primary partitions, and one extended partition with a boot partition, a home partition, maybe a fat32 partition, and a ubuntu partition. If I want to, and still have some space, I imagine I can then resize, and put another linux distro in as a logical partiton. Is this reasonable? It's probably very unpractical to run so many OSes, but I'd only do this to get exerience with partitions and *nix in general.

I have access to many free and non-free partitioning tools.

With so many tech-heads on this board, I'm surprised no one has any leads...

Tobias Greeshman

I've never tried to put more than 2 OS's on the one computer.

Don't understand why you want to put so many OS's on your computer except for the hell of it.

Linux can be run on Logical particions,

The 1st time I tried it I dual booted Mandrake 8 with Win2k, put Mandrake's /boot, /, and swap on separate particions and copied linux's boot record into a file and placed it into the C:\ on the Win2k Particion and edited boot.ini so the Windows bootloader could be used to load each OS. You could do it this way.

The last time I just had Red Hat 9 and WinXP Pro. Redhat had a / and swap particion only. Installed it after XP and loaded grub into the hard drives MBR, nice and easy and will allow you to load XP, Redhat all on logical particions. I'd say this is the easiest way to go about things.

As far as I know you can have as many logical particions as you like. Be careful with primary particions (I made that mistake once and won't forget it in a hurry, you can only have 2 primary particions).

If you have access to Particion Magic, then you're sorted. I'd say install them all after you have particions setup, create boot disks for each one so you can get back into them. Then add each os as an entry in Grub in Linux and load Grub into the MBR. That should work, and that's how I'd go about things.

SwampThing

Have you considered virtualisation?

You can have as many OS's you want without fecking around with dual/triple booting.

Check out VMWare's site - I think they've rejigged their products to allow you have a version for free.