Extreme Multibooting

[Brian.Henderson@xxxxxxxx]

Since we seem to be running rather far afield lately (not that I'm
complaining, particularly), I thought I'd submit something fun and a bit
more on-topic (although not entirely on-topic).
Many of us have a keen interest in multibooting, so I thought these two
entries from one of my favorite newsletters (The LangaList) might be of
interest:

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...I thought you might be interested in this multi-boot system (37 OSes in
one box - 53 if you count DOS windows managers) using some nasty
partitioning, 6 hard drives, and XOSL ( http://www.xosl.org ) a great
freeware boot manager. There's a brief feature in MaximumPC about this:
http://www.maximumpc.com/features/feature_2002-09-24.html

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...I must be brave or insane, but I don't understand why people fear
repartitioning their hard disks! What I want to offer is another alternative
to [traditional] multibooting. At work I have to maintain a computer lab
wherein students need access to a variety of operating systems. Currently,
you can choose to use Windows XP Professional, Windows 2000 Server, Red Hat
Linux 8.0, Windows 98 Second Edition and Windows NT Server 4.0. All the OSes
reside on a single 60 GB hard disk. You might be asking yourself how'd I get
4 Microsoft OSes and Linux booting from a single drive when you can only
have 4 primary partitions? I'll admit this took a some effort with a disk
editor and the internet to figure out, but the results were worth it. The
glue that holds it all together is an Open Source [free] boot loader called
XOSL available at http://www.xosl.org .

This little utility is fairly simple to install (it fits on a single floppy
disk) and deliciously powerful in its configuration. With the help of Ghost
or Drive Image you can work some multiboot magic. For instance here's what I
have setup.

Because each OS may have particular installation requirements like 1024
cylinder boundary restrictions, 8.4 GB partition limits, etc, I partitioned
the disk like this:

Primary 1 Windows NT Server 4 (2GB) NTFS
Primary 2 Windows 2000 Server (4GB) NTFS
Primary 3 Windows XP Professional (26GB) NTFS
Extended partition containing:
  Logical 1 Windows 98 Second Edition (8GB) FAT32
  Logical 2 Red Hat Linux 8 (4GB) extfs3
  Logical 3 Linux swap (1GB) linuxswap
  Logical 4 DOS 7.1 (70MB) FAT16
10GB free space

XOSL installs in the master boot record a small boot loader program that
then loads a menu application, whose files can be installed in a dedicated
XOSL partition type or any FAT16 or FAT32 partition. I chose to put the XOSL
menu files in the FAT16 logical partition.

The first step is to install each Microsoft operating system by itself so
that it resides in a C drive. Make an image and store it preferably on
another computer. Once that is done, partition the hard disk accordingly,
install XOSL and restore each OS to its final location. When you configure
the XOSL boot menu, you choose the partition to boot from and optionally,
you can hide the other OS partitions so that each OS will still see itself
as the C drive. Linux is best installed after all the other OS are in place
so that you can setup GRUB or LILO without complications.

As for the trick to get Windows 98 to boot from a logical partition? This
web site http://www.goodells.net/multiboot provided the answers. Basically,
you need to edit the partition table of the MBR using PowerQuest's
ptedit.exe (which comes with both Drive Image and Partition Magic, or as a
free download from their web site) to tell the boot loader where to locate
the boot sector for a particular Microsoft OS residing in the extended
partition. For DOS/Win9x, you must also enable the INT13 extension in the
partition by using a disk editor. You can also boot from a floppy via XOSL,
which is handy since you will have to boot from a floppy and sys c: the
partition.

The ability to boot DOS residing in a logical partition allowed me to set up
a simple DOS menu system using config.sys and autoexec.bat which offered a
Ghosting menu that launched the ghost.exe client from the hard drive rather
than from a floppy disk. With command line switches I can easily reghost the
whole disk or individual partitions with 3 quick keystrokes after a reboot.

Of course, very few home computer users would want to go to this much
trouble for multibooting, but I just wanted to point out a solution that
saved my employer $10,000; the alternative was a PCI multiboot card. Thanks
for your time, Phillip Chee