Re: Multi-boot multiple Windows O/Ses and Linux

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 08:19:37PM -0600, Randy Decker wrote:
> With MS support for XP ending 8Apr2014 I am considering upgrading my software 
> configuration.  I 
> currently multiboot Windows XP and Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS (GNU/Linux 
> 3.2.0-35-generic i686) with GRUB 
> 1.99-21 ubuntu 3.7 updated automatically by ubuntu's update manager.  At one 
> point my hardware 
> passed MS's test for windows 7 so I believe that is an option.  
> 
> I want to retain XP so I don't need to repurchase all the old software that 
> currently works fine 
> and because I have hardware that requires the game port interface that MS 
> chose not to support in 
> newer software.  

I thought XP dropped support for the old game port.  It's been so long
I don't even remember.

> I am very happy with Ubuntu and find myself using it by preference when I 
> can.  I'm not sure 
> where I placed my XP install disk after I mis-applied GRUB and overwrote the 
> MBR (back when I 
> think Ubuntu 9.04 was current). I would like to avoid that problem in the 
> future.  Perhaps I 
> could dd the 440 or 512 bytes of the MBR for insurance just in case.  
> 
> My hardware is a generic PC with an AMD Duron and 2 GB of RAM. XP is on a 
> master IDE drive. A 
> SATA drive has three primary (MSDOS) partitions containing another XP 
> "drive", Ubuntu, and 
> linux-swap.  Until recently these 3 partitions resided on the slave IDE 
> interface but gparted was 
> kind enough to move them all to a bigger newer SATA drive.  The old drive is 
> now retired.
> 
> I know grub is great at multiple O/Ses but windows is anti-social toward 
> other O/Ses.  My 
> questions are:
> 1 Can grub2 handle both XP and 7 in one configuration along with Linux?
> 2 If so, can it still be compatible with Ubuntu's update manager?
> 3 How would one approach the reconfiguration?
> 4 Will 4 partitions be sufficient? 
> 5 Will GRUB want a partition?
> 6 What would I need to be careful to avoid?
> 
> I would expect to buy 7 to install on the SATA drive.  I'm not sure how to 
> install 7 without 
> corrupting the MBR for XP.  I didn't put the linux and linux-swap partitions 
> in an extended 
> partition on the SATA drive as they were on the IDE drive. I hadn't figured 
> out yet how to create the extended partition in gparted and I still had a 
> spare.  I expect if I needed more than 4 partitions I 
> could copy the two linux partitions to a USB drive and back to an extended 
> partition.
> 
> I have enjoyed reading your advice.  Thanks for any illumination you can 
> provide.  I copied the To: line,  I hope I have it right.  I ensured this is 
> plain Text.

The general behaviour of windows is that it insists on booting from the first 
windows filesystem.

Now certainly if you have XP installed and you then install windows
7 and pick a different partition to install to than XP is on, then it
should create a windows boot menu with both XP and windows 7 on your C:
partition.  Installing windows will of course trash grub, so you will
have to boot linux from some other method and reinstall grub to fix
that afterwards.

If you then install linux, then grub should be able to boot the windows
boot menu.

So you would end up with at boot:

grub menu showing linux and windows
If you select linux, then you get linux
If you select windows, then you get the windows boot menu
The windows boot menu would show XP and Windows 7 as options and whichever
you choose you get.

Now weather windows 7 will "upgrade" the filesystem so XP can't read it
anymore, or mess up anything else, who knows.  I have seen NT4 have issues
after windows 2000 touched a filesystem in the past, so you never know.

It might be possible to use partition hiding and other tricks with grub
to make each windows totally unaware of the other and just have grub be
the boot menu, but I have never played with that.

You could certainly save a lot of partitions if your linux swap and root
were logical partitions.  That way they would combined only count as
one primary partition.

Grub does not want a partition, it just uses the space after the partition
table in track 1 for embedding.

-- 
Len Sorensen