Hello,

This is a doozie of a problem. The question is if you want all of the OS to be able to work files with each other... does the RH OS need to see the XP files? In XP, do you want to see debian?

I do not think a 40 GB hard drive is going to be enough to do it all, especially if you want equal installations on each environment (meaning all have open office, all have web browsers, all have compiler tools).

I know that you will need to choose one OS to manage the boot loader, and that you will need to install XP first after your partitioning is complete. If you want other OS to see XP data, you best format FAT32 and leave NTFS alone.

You are going to need to use extended partitions on the physical drive.

Before getting too deep into this, you might want to make sure you need ALL of them installed on that one physical disk. You might find it easier in terms of time cost to go and get a couple other hard drives, and then swap them in and out as needed.

And once you do set it up, you best document how you did it, and also use something like Ghost to back them all up to a network, or perhaps DVD disks.

Christian

You can fit those 4 operating systems in 40G, but things will probably get a little tight if you plan on installing tons of apps or storing a lot of data.

There are a lot of suggestions for multi-booting combinations of the operating systems you want to install in this Google search:
http://www.google.com/linux?hl=en&lr...=Google+Search

As Christian mentioned, if you want to share files between the different environments, it would be a good idea to set aside a small slice of the drive for a FAT32 shared data storage partition; Linux isn't fully interoperable with NTFS filesystems.

You will also want to set aside 256-512M of the disk for a swap (virtual memory) partition. A single swap partition can be used by both of your Linux installations and FreeBSD, although there are some issues with sharing swap between Linux and BSD. More on that here:
http://www.google.com/linux?hl=en&lr...=Google+Search

I've successfully run Win98,2k, Slackware, Mandrake, and FreeBSD, all on the same machine.

Of course, I had 2 30GB drives in my system. I used a program called XOSL (eXtended Operating System Loader) to boot between the OSes, so I didn't have to fool with configuring the multitude of other bootloaders. It's a really neat bootloader to run, it's GUI, like System Commander was, so it's pretty easy to configure.

http://www.ranish.com/part/xosl.htm

Just keep in mind, though, that you have to install and run it from a FAT32 partition, and the initial install has to be from DOS. I recommend either installing WinXP into a FAT32 partition, and then using either a DOS bootdisk or a FreeDOS liveCD to actually install the bootloader from.

Hello:

By the way you can do it easily, depending if you want to use a commercial software or a free one. Commercial one very simple to use, it's name PARTITION MAGIC, and the free one you can download from Ranish homepage, the name is Ranish of course.

You comments, whenever you want.

Miguel Ã?ngel

You've probably already solved this problem a long time ago, but in case you haven't here's an article about VMWare which is a program that allows you to
run multiple operating systems on the same computer without repartitioning or even rebooting. In this blog, the author states it's a $299 program, but it's actually $189 USD download or $199 if you want the disks and books. There's a 30 day free trial period on it.
http://blog.kowalczyk.info/articles/...ithVmware.html

There's also a similar Microsoft program that you can try out for free called Microsoft Virtual PC and it has a 45 day free trial period. It looks like you could run all of the above operating systems that you want on your computer, all at the same time, and easily switch between them.

Microsoft Virtual PC sells for $129.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtualpc/default.mspx