Date: Mon, 29 May 2000 00:18:58 -0400 From: "Gary T. Corcoran" <garycor@home.com> To: Steve Hill <sjhill@cotw.com> Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Creating a system to boot 4 different OS types. Message-ID: <3931EFB2.472EDDCC@home.com> References: <3931E60F.A97F7B70@cotw.com>
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Steve Hill wrote: > > Well, I am getting ready to attempt a quad-boot system. I wish to boot > one of the following configurations: > > First CONFIG: > - WinNT > - FreeBSD > - Linux > - NetBSD > > Second CONFIG: > - WinNT > - FreeBSD > - Linux > - OpenBSD > > The two or three main issues for me are: > > 1) Choosing the right bootloader. I believe the WinNT OS loader would work, > but I am not completely sure about LILO for booting the above 4 OSes. LILO should work for you. At work I have it triple (quad) booting Win98/Win2000, Linux, FreeBSD. You may want to choose LILO as it may be the only one to work with Linux in this configuration - see below. > 2) Since I cannot place a *BSD slice in an extended partition, it appears > I will have to do something like (sorry for using Linux device naming > scheme): > > /dev/hda1 WinNT > /dev/hda2 Linux > /dev/hda3 BSD/386 (FreeBSD) > /dev/hda4 BSD/386 (OpenBSD or NetBSD) > > I think this should work. The only thing is that one of the BSD slices > will need to share its swap space with Linux, which is not a problem. The easiest thing to do is have Linux use up only one of the four DOS partitions, as you have listed above. Unfortunately, it wants to use up a whole partition for swap. The way around that is to use a DOS "extended" partition into which you put both the main Linux filesystem partition, and a swap partition, each taking up the equivalent of a "logical drive" in DOS terms, e.g. /dev/hda5 and /dev/hda6. (FreeBSD, of course, only takes up one DOS partition, which you can subdivide into filesystem(s) and swap) BUT - the only bootloader I know of that will let you boot an OS from a DOS extended partition is LILO - that's why it may be what you want to use. So you'll probably want to install Linux last, so that the only choice is using up the only remaining partition, instead of having it grab two. You might have to create the DOS extended partition using windows tools... And don't forget that you'll have to have *all* boot partitions below the "8 GB" limit. Your (last) filesystem can extend beyond 8GB, but you have to ensure that the boot files for it are below 8 gig, due to the 1024 cylinder BIOS boot limitation... > 3) I guess the stuff in (2) should work. Another question would be if the > swap partition in one of the BSD slices can be shared with the another > BSD variant (i.e. swap space in FreeBSD slice '/dev/hda3' can be used by > NetBSD or OpenBSD slice '/dev/hda4')? Don't know about this - you probably can - but unless you're short on disk space, there's no need to do it. As I said above, you partition up your slice (DOS partition) into filesystems plus swap in a single DOS partition. Gary To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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