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Triple boot?


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#1
Brads2011

Brads2011

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I am getting a new laptop sometime within the next few days and I was planning on having 3 operating systems on it, the laptop has 2x 500GB HDD's so I was thinking of having windows 7 on the first one, and then on the second HDD creating 3 partitions (25gb, 50gb and 425gb) and putting the other two OS on the two low size partitions and using the extra for storage.

How would I go about this safely? I was hoping to set up my BIOS so that HDD 1 auto boots win 7, and when I press F12 I had the option to boot from the second HDD and choose between the other two OS's.

Is this possible? Also I was hoping I could get some advice on how I would go about doing this. I was thinking to first install win 7 on HDD one, then partition HDD 2 with the windows utilities and then installing mac and then backtrack.

If I am an idiot and this won't work, please tell me =)
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#2
Gouverneur

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I recommend obtaining Paragon Partition Manager 10 or Acronis Disk Director 11. Both include a handy Boot Manager. I think Acronis took over the Paragon software.

I am currently using the Paragon software to run 5 operating systems, which is a bit tricky to setup. Up to 4 operating systems is easy. I am planning to switch over to the Acronis Disk Director (I already bought it).

I recommend putting all the operating systems on the first hard disk. If you never intend to use more than 3, setup as follows: 3 operating systems in Primary partitions (about 60GB per system is ample) & some logical partitions in an extended partition. Use the second disk for data files. This will minimize Disk Head movement, saving a small amount of time & decreasing the mean time to failure for your disks. Moving Read/Write Heads is mechanical: It is slow; Mechanical failure is more likely than electronic failure.

Both the Paragon & Acronis software can resize partitons containing an OS and/or data. You can change the amount of space assigned to each OS if your original allocation is not good.

With a 250 GB disk, you can afford to have a Page File for each operating system in its own partition. You might consider having a common Page File on the second disk. I have three disks: Operating systems on the first; Data on the second, & a common Page file on third disk, using remaining space for interim backup (periodically offloading backup data to an external disk).

Note that all operating systems have access to the 2nd & 3rd disk. Data files in an OS partiton cannot be accessed by other operating systems.
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