Setting up quad boot

[davr0s]

Hi,

 

I'm new to this multi-booting lark, and would like to ask how best to go about it instead of wating tonight guessing and getting it wrong. I've searched other threads but nothing seems to match my configuration of 1xSATA and 2xIDE drives with Vista already installed on the SATA.

I have Vista x64 installed already on a SATA drive (which I would prefer not to have to reinstall), and want to add XP x64, OSX86 and Ubuntu to my two empty 80GB IDE drives. I have EasyBCD installed on Vista and am happy to use that to boot, if it will work.

 

My questions are these:

Should I install two OSes on one IDE drive and one on the other, or all three on one and format the other with a couple of FAT32 partitions?

If the 2+1 solution is best, which OS should be the one on its own drive?

Does it make any difference what HD an OS is on if they are on separate primary partitions?

What order would be best to install the OSes, starting with Vista already installed?

Will I need to copy the chain0 file to my C: in Vista or make any other changes, or can EasyBCD handle it alone?

 

Thanks for any help!

davr0s

[Lord_Richard_2]

I would format an ide hard drive as a data harddrive, fat32 or ntfs, or use macdrive and have it as hfs+ (Mac filesystem), and then use the extra ide as an xp and osx hard drive. I would have vista on the sata drive. Im not completely sure of osx and ide, but if it argues you can just use gparted and allocate like 15GB for osx and install there on the sata hard drive. After you install osx you need your vista disc, or i think gparted, and just change the active boot partition flag. I use the vista bootloader and use chain0 to boot into osx. I used easy bcd and i had to copy a standard winxp boot info entry and then change it to point to chain0 on C: drive and then i renamed it using BCD and mac osx setting. It boots to the darwin bootloader and i can select leapard and enter -v to see if there is errors. After installing osx, partitioning and installing xp you should use chkdsk or somehting else to check OSX. If you get a missing operating system, failed to load operating system, or a missing ntldr or hal.dll try and make sure those files are in there spots by booting to vista, and then use gparted live cd to change the boot flag.