I am trying to put 3 operating systems on my PC. They are Xp, vista and windows. Plz dont ask me why I want all three. I am using Gparted live and I seem to be doing something wrong. I have 2 HD's on my PC. One is 70 GB and the other is 500 Gb. I want to put XP on 70 Gb HD and the other 2 on 500 GB. What I need to know is I partition and format 70 GB as primary and ntfs and it works fine. When I put the other 2 OS on separate OS's and i partition 2 different ones do I need to make them both secondary partitions and format them both as NTFS? I am screwing something up but not sure what. I appreciater any help given. thx
When I installed my 5 OS's on my 500 GB Hdd, first I installed XP then Partition Magic 9.0. Then I shrank the XP drive & created 4 more partitions, 3 (I think) primary & 1 extended. Next I started installing the oldest = Vista then Windows 7 (3 flavors). Installing the oldest OS first is recommended. As I installed Vista & Win7's each created a boot menu item & was automatically added to the boot menu. No problems doing it this way. Good luck
My solution was to create 3 primary and 1 logical partitions. I have Linux, Windows XP and Windows 7 installed in the primary partitions. The extended (logical) drive is formatted as NTFS and is accessible from all operating systems. I use Gag as the boot manager and have configured it to hide the primary partitions that are not in use. This way which ever version of Windows I choose, I have the OS on drive C: and drive D: for data. Linux works similarly but of course the file structure does not assign drive letters.
I occasionaly use Virtual Machines but have experienced enough compatibility and performance issues to prevent me from using them on a routine basis.
The advantage of configuring the system with multiple primary partitions and GAG is that each OS is totally isolated from the others. Originaly I installed Linux last and let grub handle the OS selection at boot time. In each version of Windows I used Disk Management to remove the drive letter assignment for the other version. Unfortunately this did not always work as well as it should have. I switched to the current configuration after I experienced cross contamination from some rather nasty malware. The disadvantage of placing each operating system in a primary partiton is that it limits you to 4 operating systems or, as in my case, 3 OS plus 1 extended (logical) drive.