[S.O.A.D.A.]

Hey hawklord,

I will need to read your post more thoroughly and follow all the links.... in the meanwhile, my hd1 (160GB) has been partitioned and blessed with a fresh administering of windoze XP, all other disks having been disconnected during installation. An unexpected problem also arose: a little piece of data got lost together with one of my old partitions on my intended hd2. Some "Shadows of Amn" game saves, to be exact. So silly of me, a freak of backups, to neglect to back them up. So I'm hectically trying to recover them, not proceeding with the rest of my plan until I do, or until I decide I've wasted enough time on this. I will report back when I resume this project, and after I have done some reading.

In the meanwhile, thanks again for all your help, mate!
Learning can sometimes be painful....

SOADA

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i'll be around for anything i can help with,

Learning can sometimes be painful....

yep, i have a 200gb hdd on the way back to seagate - lost about 50gb of data, i really should take my own advice

[hawklord]

i'll be around for anything i can help with,

Learning can sometimes be painful....

yep, i have a 200gb hdd on the way back to seagate - lost about 50gb of data, i really should take my own advice

[S.O.A.D.A.]

Seagate.... when I was buying my third HD I was thinking of getting either a Seagate or a WD, with preference for Seagate. After some research I learned from a few sources that Seagate had been experiencing some bad times - many disks failing, noisy, overheating - so I went with good old WD which had never ever failed me (though they too had their bad times about a decade or so ago). One day, at a computer hardware store, I saw a guy returning a malfunctioning Seagate, and congratulated myself on my choice.

Hope I'm not rubbing it in, man.

But I am always at my stupidest when I'm working on my own machine. Always. And I tend to get hysterical, which is the worst possible state of mind to be in when doing such work. I think I need to be kicked hard a few times to reboot my own wetware : )

Well....
SOADA

[jacobt]

I am in the same position right now. I want to install my Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Slackware and Mac OS X each in respective partitions.
I was looking at either installing GRUB using Super Grub Disk or a program called OSL2000 http://www.osloader.com/ (which I haven't heard too much about)
Any suggestions or links would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Jacob

[S.O.A.D.A.]

This is becoming an adventurous topic. The staggering quantities of things to try out and study is petrifying, makes you feel you will never attain enlightenment or even moderate geekhood. What about the soon to be released Google OS? Chrome, I think they call it. Anybody thinking of trying it out?

And, a question: if you install a bootloader on a small partition of its own before installing any other OS, wouldn't installing an OS after that, on the same physical disk, cause the reference to the bootloader in the MBR to be overwritten by the OS? I must be missing something here.

SOADA

[S.O.A.D.A.]

Alright,

Ladies, gentlemen, we have preliminary results.
First allow me to announce that I have had 74% success in the implementation of The Scheme - a triple-boot, so far, of Ubuntu Desktop 9.0.4 64bit / Windoze XP Professional / Vista Ultimate 64bit.

My disks' layout is as follows:
===============================================

sda: WD320BG
------------------------
sda1: 30GiB mnt: / filesystem: ext4
sda2: Rest (~270GiB) mnt: Data filesystem: ntfs

sdb: WD500GB
------------------------
sdb1: 200GiB mnt: /home filesystem: ext3
sdb2: 6Gib mnt: swap filesystem: Linux swap
sdb3: Rest (~260 GiB) mnt: Data filesystem: ntfs

sdc: WD160GB
------------------------
sdc1: 30GiB mnt: Windoze XP filesystem: ntfs
sdc2: 30GiB mnt: Windoze Vista filesystem: ntfs
sdc3: 30GiB mnt: Data filesystem: ntfs
sdc4: Rest (59BiG) mnt: Data filesystem: ntfs
===============================================

In mnt I meant either what's mounted on the partition (applies to Linux partitions) or what the partition is used for (ntfs - Windoze - partitions).

I first installed XP & Vista on sdc, with the other two not connected. Then cleaned the box, replaced my old 2 Kingston 0.5GiB sticks with two new Corsair 2GiB sticks (gotta brag, me), disconnected sdc, connected sda & sdb, installed Ubuntu + updates, shutdown the computer and reconnected sdc, in /boot/grub/menu.lst changed the following lines (values after change):

default 2
hiddenmenu

Added the following lines right before the Automatic Kernel List:

title XP
root (hd2,0)
chainloader +1

title Vista
root (hd2,1)
chainloader +1

It almost works. If, in BIOS, the boot priority of my disks is identical to their physical order, I can boot into Ubuntu or into Vista with no problems. If I wish to boot into XP, however, it won't work - will simply restart, no error messages or anything, without even getting me to the screen when I can select XP or the recovery console. But if, in BIOS, I move the windows disk (sdc) to the top of the list, I get the Vista boot loader instead of GRUB, and I can boot into either XP or Vista, no problems.

Wonder why that happens?

One additional thing: when I boot into linux I keep getting the following error message:

MP-BIOS bug 8254: timer not connected to IO-APIC

Any ideas?
: )

SOADA

[silverbeard]

Re-install Ubuntu. Leave the windows partions/disks plugged in. Ubuntu should recognize the other OSes and write grub for you.

[S.O.A.D.A.]

Hi silverbeard,

This should work, I think. But what if I want to install Windows 7 after that, on my Windoze disk?

[silverbeard]

I unplug all but the drive I'm installing to. Windows doesn't like file systems that are not native to Windows. One thing I've come to do is make note of the drive sequence in the BIOS,mine has a habit of making the last drive booted as the primary and moving it to the first position in sequence. I have MBRs on multiple drives so I can boot without using Grub for things like updating Windows (Sp2 for Vista wouldn't install if you use a different boot loader)

As long as you boot the MBR pointing to Grub it should boot Win 7 because of the chainloader. You might want to update the title in th menu.lst.

[S.O.A.D.A.]

I'm afraid I see no solution in your reply.

Boot sequence changing in BIOS without my intervention... has never happened to me.
Installing any M$ O$ must be done with other disks disconnected - that's obvious.
But then I either need to reinstall ubuntu with all disks plugged in - to do so each time I add a new M$ OS should not even be considered - or edit the GRUB menu correctly which is, currently, my dream.

What I do now, is change the boot sequence in BIOS each time I wanna switch between Linux & MustDie. For some reason, when I use the GRUB entry for Vista, the Vista boot loader comes up, and Vista would load, but if I use the "Older version...." option it just reboots, without loading XP.

SOADA