New
#1501
OK thanks for your reply.. I get it now.![]()
Dwarf's Multi-Boot System - Update 1
The proof of the pudding is, as they say, in the eating. So here I am, posting from XP SP3.
It's currently the only OS I have installed, as it would only install to the first listed drive, so I had to delete the other OSes. I'm going to do a full reinstall, but in groups. Within each group, I'm only going to connect the drive(s) required for the installation, and then use the one-time-boot option in the BIOS to boot to them, if I don't want to boot to the default Vista/Windows 7/Windows 8 options.
So, I will eventually have the disks set up as follows:
Group 1 (default) (500GB disks)
Disk0 System Reserved Partition, W7 Ultimate (x86), W7 Ultimate (x64)
Disk1 Vista Ultimate (x86), Vista Ultimate (x64)
Disk 2 Windows 8 (x86), Windows 8 (x64)
Group 2 (80GB disk)
Disk 3 Windows XP Professional SP3 (x86)
Group 3 (80GB disk)
Disk 4 Ubuntu 10.04 (x86), Ubuntu 10.04 (x64)
I also mentioned about overcoming hurdles. I met the first one here - my XP USB key wouldn't recognise any of my internal HDDs, so I had to integrate the required storage driver using nLite (I've got backups of all Windows OSes in both ISO and extracted format). The second one, which I shall have to overcome, is to have sufficient power connectors for the HDDs, and to get another 500GB HDD so that I can use it for my Windows 8 installations. Fortunately, these are easy to overcome, but not at this time on a Sunday.
More updates later.
Because the first drive listed, that I didn't want to install on, contained the system reserved partition which is not compatible with XP (didn't exist back in 2001 when XP first came out). I tried to install to the currently empty 80GB drive, but couldn't because of that restriction Therefore, I wiped my system and installed to the first HDD. I know that I could have disconnected the drives and then installed on the 80GB drive, but I was only really checking that the XP USB installation drive worked and, as you can see, it does. I intend to set my system up in groups as described above, so I was going to do a full reinstall anyway.