Multi-OS installation strategy [Retro-PC series]

quapan via Flickr

I wanted to have a flexible way to install multiple operating systems on my Retro-PC project. Something that would let you play and evaluate installations without being screwed up when possible mistakes happen.

Due to how OS installers tend to change the way computer boots (by overwriting MBR), most of the guides I found simply recommend strategies such as installing Windows 98 first, followed by Windows XP and leaving the possible Linux distribution for the last. The foundation for the strategy I use comes from Michael Ward’s Guide to using GRUB.

With the right tools you can install the operating systems of your choice in the order you want, and (relatively) easily retain the control to operating system selector on boot. You can also configure your system so that the operating systems only “see” their own hard disk partitions. In practice this means that your MS-DOS has it’s own a FAT partition as C-drive, Windows 98 has (an another) FAT32 partition also visible as C-drive, and Windows XP has its own NTFS partition as C-drive, too. This does only make it easier for legacy operating systems to boot themselves up, but this also feels much more “appropriate” isolating the operating systems and their content from each other. In my strategy, Ubuntu has “special privileges” having all the drives and operating systems visible, thus making using of various disk utilities a bit easier.

To summarize:

• Use a disk partitioning utility (such as GParted) to divide your disk into four appropriate partitions (MS-DOS, Windows 98, Windows XP, Ubuntu)
• Install Ubuntu (or use some other method to have easy access GRUB2)
• Configure multi-boot software (e.g. GRUB 2) – especially adjust the visibility of partitions the operating systems see
• Install MS-DOS and Windows 98 so that they don’t mess with MBR
• Backup MBR, install Windows XP, and restore original multi-boot MBR with disk utilities (such as dd)

In the next posts, I will go the process through for more details. We start by preparing the disk with GParted. We will then install Ubuntu, tweak some GRUB 2 configuration, backup MBR, and finally, install (in any desired order) MS-DOS, Windows 98 and Windows XP.