On 10/7/07, stan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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? >
YES! I do it all the time. Some times FreeBSD is replaced by NetBSD or DragonFlyBSD. I do it mostly for learning purposes with different distros. There are many ways to do it. I will tell you one of the ways I do it. A simple one. the things to remember here is 1) it is easier to get Windows installed on the beginning so you have less hassle. 2) Open/DragonFly/Net/FreeBSD needs a primary partition 3) Linux needs a boot loader like Grub/lilo/ to boot it. Now I will not bother to explain the why?s in some areas but if you follow this path you can get it done easily. 1) Install XP first in a partition on the begining of the hard disk. I assume it is an 80 GB hard disk. So I install XP on the first 10 GB leaving the rest of the disk as blank space. Then I boot into XP and create 2 primary partitions of 20 GB each ( Don't format it or assign drive letter ) for FreeBSD and OpenBSD. so 30 GB is gone and you will have 40+ GB as free space. In the free space I make an extended partition. On the beginning of the extended partition I make a 5GB logical partition and format it with fat32 file system for sharing of files between OSes. Now I install Linux mostly debian and slackware or some times other distros in the freespace. The swap partition is shared. so assuming you are installing Debian and Slackware in the logical partition after the 5GB fat32 partition I create a 1GB swap space and install debian in a 15GB ext3fs ( or what ever like xfs/jfs/ReiserFs ). If it is ext3fs or xfs you can mount it under you BSD Oses. I install the grub bootloader on the master boot record. then I proceed to install slackware on the free space you can again install the grub boot loader in the master boot record if you don't know advanced grub configuration and you can still boot XP, debian and slackware and it will automatically update the boot menu overwriting the grub you installed with debian safely :-) So now we have Primary partition 1 - Windows XP ( installed ) Primary partition 2 - FreeBSD ( yet to be done ) Primary pastition 3 - OpenBSD ( yet to be done) Partition 4 - is an extended partition with logical drives logical drive 1 - fat32 logical drive 2 - swap logical drive 3 - Debian on ext3fs logical drive 4 - Slackware on xfs Now you can install FreeBSD on Primary Partition2 Make sure you install OpenSBD on partition 3 if you don't know the offset calculations because when OpenBSD is installed on 2nd partition I have found that offset no. calculations are not updated automatically and have to be specified manually. Install OpenBSD on the 3rd Primary Partition the reason for installing the BSDs last is that the disklabel will have all the other partitions in it so you don't have to manually edit it if you need to mount the Linux partitions under them. Now you can boot into your slackware and and grub.conf read it and use the chainloader line in your entries for FreeBSD and OpenBSD Now when you start the system grub will come up with all the Oses listed and you can boot into anyone you want. What I do these days is Just install OpenBSd in the whole disk with a large var partition and use http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/ to try out all the many differrent distros :-) more convineint some times if you don't have to do advanced networking stuff :-) Please ask any clarifications offline becuase this is not an OpenBSD specific question. We can be thereby decent and keep the traffic on the list low and on more OpenBSd relevant topics :-) Kind Regards Siju
