I recently came across a copy of windows XP professional so that when I get to support it I know how to use the OS. I’ve allready installed windows ME and windows 2000 professional on my computer so I could play with them…
so, should I triboot my system…most normal people would say no, what on earth would I need 3 OS for? Would the 3 be able to coexist peacefully…3 MS products working at once? All logic says that its a terrible idea…so I did it.
The install actually went well. I initated the install in WinMe. XP wanted to upgrade, but also gave me the option for a seperate install so I chose that. Windows shortly there after rebooted. On the reboot my system asks me to choose an OS – that screen flashed by so quickly I could barely read it. Windows XP Professional was on the list and was automatically chosen.
The install was uneventful – the only catch was that the setup wanted to install to c:\windows. Well my winME system is in that directory, so I changed it to C:\winxp. Beyond that there was no interaction necessary.
once into windows all of my hardware was installed automatically – GeForce2 ultra card, SB live card, both net cards, and my printer. IE6 immediately found my cable modem and brought up the MSN home page (nice try bill) – I changed that to my homepage and the rest is history. The only change required was to tell the system I have digital surround sound speakers.
So 1 hr in to the process the situation is good, and I am reasonably impressed with winXP even though it looks like a 10 year old drew it in crayons. There is an option to change everything back to a standard windows view, but I bet most of the clients of my computer company won’t do that…better get used to crayola windows.
Yeah tri boot is feasable and can be useful, but I prefer using separate partitions for each OS. This allows you to stick in other OSes you might want to play with. A decent boot loader and file system utilites will let you boot without much trouble and share files between OSes on different file systems. Seems cleaner to me.
Right now I have win98 and win2000 on two separate physical drives, and to boot to the other OS, I go into the BIOS and change the boot order. This avoides the boot loader, since I mostly use win2000 and keeps the OSes totally separate. I can read/write the win98 drive from win2000 by default, and if the need arose I could get a utility to read NTFS from win98.
Crayola windows huh? Personally I think XP has some good ideas in the design of it, but even so I think I prefer the standard boring look on win2000. Not to say that it could easily be improved upon.
Tribooting? How quaint. I just made a screenshot of 6 OSes running simultaneously on my Mac (Win2k, Win98SE, BSD/Gnome, MacOS9, MacOS X, and MAME) and no rebooting required. But then, you can’t do this on a PC. You can do SOME of this trickery, I recommend you investigate Virtual PC. No, it’s not just for Macs anymore. Virtual PC allows you to do multiple OSes at the same time without complex booting trickery.
For multiple versions of Windows, I’d absolutely recommend separate partitions. Even though you can change the name of the Windows installation directory, 95, 98, and 2000 all use a “Program Files” directory on their default drive that you can’t redirect to a different name. I haven’t used ME or XP but I assume they do the same. Having two Windows versions on the same drive will result in the ‘Program Files’ directory having a problematic combination of files in it.
Hmmph! I’m not getting the useful replies I’d hoped for in my thread over here so since it is tangential to this thread, I’m asking it again:
How do you get clear the OS Loader menu of redundant operating systems? In addition to regular and VGA versions of Windows NT and Windows 2000, I’ve got all those choices again a SECOND time, plus NT Setup from a long-ago & ill-fated setup attempt, and “Microsoft Windows” (dating back, I guess, to the Windows 95 that was booted when I first tried installing NT on the D drive).
[sub][sup](Yes, Chas.E, it’s VPC but you knew that)[/sup][/sub]
On a Mac or PC? I had a similar problem booting into an OS choice, Win98 or Win2k, when trying to set up a Win2k volume on a Mac. It was an error on my setup. I just wiped the volume and started over, I was trying to overwrite the Win98 vol with a Win2k vol but instead, somehow I set up a dual boot volume instead, with both OSes on one vol. Then when I set up the Win2k vol correctly, it still booted into the setup/boot choice. I found some setting to correct this, to boot directly into Win2k and not Setup, but I can’t recall offhand what it was.
Any of that help?
just when I thought I was doing something novel Chas has to come in here and take away all my fun.
At my place of employement we have a PC with 5 OS on it. I havent played with it much (actually I just looked at it once, its on the other side of the building and they actually make me work)
I’ve been dual booting the system with win2000 and ME for about 6 months now and have had no problems with them both on one partition. I had considered doing the multi partition action, but ME was allready installed, and I as too lazy to start over. I figured that if it did cause problems in the long run, I’d just multipartition then. If XP works as well as it is supposed to, I may very well remove the other two.
XP has some great ideas in it as far as what the goals for the OS are. The compatability of the 9x kernel with the stablility of Win2k. If it manages to pull it off it will be a huge leap in the windows series of OS. It does have that yucky crayola “I’m a computer, I’m friendly, you can use me.” feel to it, but that can be disabled and restored to the standard windows scheme.
Chas. E, what happened was that I installed NT the first time without some options I had wanted to set up, and couldn’t figure out how to rectify the situation, so, impatient, I quit VPC and threw away the virtual hard drive, created a new one, and started over. Then the village idiot working in our office unplugged the external SCSI hard drive that contained the virtual hard drives (“Oh, you were using that? I thought someone had left it out and I was going to put it back on the shelf”). The next install went without a hitch, but somehow the OS Loader “remembers” the first NT partition and the incomplete NT Setup, so they appear on the list. Actually, I think the Setup option disappeared after I installed Windows 2K the other day, but I still have two listings for Windows NT and two more for Windows NT (VGA) which appears to be the NT equivalent of “Safe Mode”. And because the C drive from which VPC was booted to install NT onto D originally contained Windows95, that’s on the menu as well.
Ideally, I’d like to pare the list down to Windows NT, Windows NT (VGA), Windows 2000, and Windows 2000 (VGA), getting rid of the duplicate entries and the “Microsoft Windows” (i.e., Win95) option.
AHunter3 - these entries are controlled by the content of the BOOT.INI file found in the root directory of your system partition.
An example BOOT.INI might contain:
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT=“Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional” /fastdetect
In this case there is only one OS loaded (win2k pro), and it is on the first partition of the first hard drive on the first controller. The menu will remain for 30 seconds, after which the default will be selected automatically and the boot process continues.
Have a look in your BOOT.INI, you will see corresponding entries for your win95, NT (VGA mode) etc. It’s just a text file which can be manipulated with notepad. Simply delete the lines that correspond to the entries you don’t want. Make a backup of this file first. Hope this helps.
Maxxxie
>How do you get clear the OS Loader menu of redundant >operating systems? In addition to regular and VGA versions >of Windows NT and Windows 2000, I’ve got all those choices >again a SECOND time, plus NT Setup from a long-ago & ill->fated setup attempt, and “Microsoft Windows” (dating back, >I guess, to the Windows 95 that was booted when I first >tried installing NT on the D drive).
For what it’s worth, we are running VMWare here on one of our Linux boxes. For testing purposes we are running something like 12 OSes under that (mostly flavours of Linux, but win98, 2000, solaris8 intel and a couple others).
No problems so far, but it does not really like sharing CD drives between virtual machines. Thank god for networking
