stan wrote: > I have a new laptop that I would like to set up to have 4 different OS's > on. The OS's I would like to install are: > > OpenBSD > FreeBSD > Linux > Windows (XP r Vista) > > Is it possible to do this on the one disk. I do have enough space, my > concern is about portions. If it is possible can anyone give me an idea how > best to approach this? Or a pointer to some docs? > > Ate the moment the machine has the Vista part-ion, and it's recovery partition > (which I figure I don;t need), and a Linux partition on it. I can boot Linux, > or Vista using Grub.
The answer to your subject: line is "with pain" Not really an OpenBSD question, more of a "How well do you know your OSs?" question... You have four primary partitions to play with. Windows, OpenBSD, and possibly FreeBSD will each *need* to be in one of those partitions. I think you are a bit fast to toss your recovery partition, you may wish to give this machine to someone else later, you might wish it was still there for their benefit (at least, dump it to something where you can later put it back. g4u may be your friend here). Besides, if you don't end up dumping your Windows installation, and probably your recovery partition by accident in this process, you were probably lucky. That leaves one partition. And Linux likes to use multiple fdisk partitions (unless you follow the advice of those that propose swapping to RAM disks). So, you probably need to make this one remaining partition an extended partition. Linux will use an extended partition, but I'm not sure if it can boot from one, nor do I know if a boot loader will extract it and boot from there (and I suspect there will be vendor-specific BIOS questions, too). That's your problem to figure out. Personally, I think this is a bad plan. I really can't imagine that you will be regularly using all four OSs on the one machine. This probably means you are wishing to learn all four OSs (or learn some and use some, whatever). "Learning" implies "not yet master of", and multi-booting requires either complete mastery of the boot process of ALL involved OSs, or a "type this and don't ask any questions" HOWTO for idiots guide, and you aren't likely to find one that matches your exact combo. Since you are asking the question, you aren't "complete master of the boot process", I suspect. Get an old PC, install ONE OS on it, learn it. Once you understand the boot process on that OS, set your laptop up to multi-boot with that OS, use your PC to learn the next one. I don't think I'd try to get four OSs on one machine, just use the laptop as a terminal for other OSs on other machines. Nick.
