Markus

Hello

I have this PC sitting next to me, into which I've put a nice 160 GB hard drive.

I want to multi-boot the thing. I have done this before, but have lucked out as I've never exceeded four OSes, and thus never hit a problem with only being able to have four primary partitions on a drive, all around 5 - 8GB in size, and then not being able to creare an extended partition/logical drive without removing a partition after installing everything.

The OSes I wish to install are:

Windows 2000 Server
Windows 2003 Server
SLES 9
Netware 6.5

That's four different OS types, and that would hit the limit of four primary partitions. Novel is a git as it'll want the first 200MB of the first partition for it's DOS partition.

Anyone know if any/all of the above OS versions have to be installed on primary partitions, or can they be installed on an Extended Partition, and/or Logical drive on a primary partition?

Would using the Disk Management (in 2000 server) option of upgrading the disk to a Dynamic Disk help at all? Would that be seen by other OSes?

I don't really want to stick another drive in the machine, but if that's the only way to do it, then so be it.

Any info greatly appreciated.

InvisibleMan

Dude, have you looked at VMWare? Not 100% certain on the SLES & Netware stuff but creating a virtual machine for each is nicer than nasty a multi boot job

Markus

Stef,
I've just taken a quick peek at VMWare (as in the official version) and it looks like it'll handle what I want to throw at it, however, it's not exactly cheap, and thus it's probably easier for me just to multi-boot the machine.

InvisibleMan

its sweet. boot up a normal xp pc, install vm, allocate Gb HD space & memory for each virtual pc. you then can have windowed pcs of all 4 os's open at the same time. You have to windows update / AV on each on but you can do than all at once which is nice. nope the licence isnt cheap, ask for a demo licence. if its just for home then yeah multi-boot will have to do but if its for work, make em pay for it the tight gits

Dazza's-STi

i use vmware and its the dogs danglies... pm me if ya need a copy,...ooops can i say that... ;-)