Quad Booting (windows XP,98SE,Vista,Ubuntu)

Worksheet III

Empty Hard drive

I strongly recommend that you start with a clean hard drive, no files on it at all. Backup all your data on another drive and put it off to the side for now. I'm using IDE. It's unclear if SATA works (either on board or an add in card). It's also unclear how well RAID is supported.

Software Requirements

Windows XP with Service Pack 2
NOTE: You should have SP2 or SP1 on the install CD, if you wish to install on to a hard drive larger than 137 GB (128 GiB). The original version of Windows XP does not support 48-bit LBA, and therefore suffers from the "137 GB limit". For more information on 48-bit LBA issues in Windows XP

Windows Vista DVD/CD Installer
Mac OS X Tiger or OSx86 10.4.8 install disc

Partitioning
You can have a max of 4 primary partitions on a disc (3 if you are using 1 extended partition) From my experience, most operating systems work best when installed on a primary partition which is what we will be doing. Logical/Extended is the other half of the spectrum.
So you can create 1 extended partition and then inside the extended partition you can create logical partitions. That way, if you are like me you can have 8 + partitions on one hard drive. It will make more sense when you boot up GParted LiveCD.
Most operating systems may work best from a primary partition, but this doesn't seem to be an issue with Linux.

Getting Started

You should have a bunch of unallocated space.

Create partitions in the following order:

1 NTFS Primary Partition, (for WinXP)
1 NTFS Primary Partition, (for Vista)
1 FAT32 Primary Partition, (for OSx86)
1 Extended Partition (with the rest of the unallocated space on the drive)
1 ReiserFS Logical Partition (for Linux install)

Then the rest of your partitions as logical partitions. I have one for games, one for programs, one for video, etc.

Installing XP

1. Install Windows XP with Service Pack 2 to your first NTFS Primary Partition.

2. After installation it is imperative you do the following so Vista's bootloader isn't installed:
3. Boot into Gparted CD
4. Right click on your first Primary NTFS partition (with xp installed on it) and select "Manage 5. 5. Flags" from the menu. Check "hidden"
6. Right click on your second Primary NTFS partition (with vista installed on it) and select "Manage Flags" again from the menu. Check "boot"
7. Restart the computer with the Vista CD in the CDrom drive

Installing Vista

Install this to the second NTFS Primary Partition. Should be a straightforward install.

NOTE: If you install Vista after another OS without doing the above steps, Vista will automatically install it's new boot loader which is a pain! You do not want Vista's boot loader installed for this tutorial!
After it's installed do the following:
1.Boot the Gparted CD again
2.Right click on your second NTFS Primary Partition and click on "manage flags". Uncheck "boot"
3.Right click on your first NTFS Primary Partition and click on "manage flags". Uncheck "hidden"