maverick1234 wrote on 2020-06-04, 21:13:

Is it possible to build a multi-boot system on a single drive with XP + Vista + 7 or the same one with 64bit editions included ? Because I have a few additional parts lying around + original Windows CDs ready to exploit and would be a shame not to use them 😉 Would it be possible to build a 6-Windows system? Or rather try this with separate HDDs or better yet using IDE to SD converter & try it with swapping cards? What are your thoughts on this matter? Any help & advice would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you.

I used to engage in similar debauchery with multi-boot systems 😁

My M.O. is to give each a single drive, installing them "blind" to each other—I only have one drive connected at the time of install. Then I plug them all in and either use the computer's boot menu (if it has one) or install Linux on yet another drive to have its boot manager find and manage them all.

I do the whole-drive-per-OS approach because older OS tend to get effed after a while (is it just me, something I do, or does this happen to everyone?) and having a clone image to just restore with Linux is a breeze.

The SD card swapping idea has potential though, I could try it in an older machine!

I think you can only have 4 operating systems on a single drive? Can you put XP on a GPT disk?

No, XP does not work on GPT.

I too favor the one OS per drive approach . On a "recent" enough motherboard (even 10+ year old boards) , your BIOS will have a boot menu option to choose which SATA drive you want to boot from .

I multiboot Centos, Windows 7 and Windows 10 on a Supermicro x8sax that way .

A while ago I was wondering how to get whole drive encryption (BitLocker or VeraCrypt) working on a multi-boot system with Windows XP. Too much of a headache. In the end I just installed one of those removable drive bays off eBay and have each OS on a different SSD/HDD.

Thank you all for the info.

Errius wrote on 2020-06-04, 21:27:

I think you can only have 4 operating systems on a single drive? Can you put XP on a GPT disk?

If you mean XP32, then No.
If you allow XP64, then it's "sort of", but you'll still end up needing 2 drives. XP64 has to boot from an MBR partition, but everything else can be on GPT.
You can use nLite to put things like Program Files and User Profiles on GPT as well, so the boot partition can be quite minimal. I had a setup like this on my main PC up until about a year ago, because I wanted to use a newer/faster drive that was too big for MBR unless I was willing to chop off half it's capacity.

That wrinkle with the boot partition with XP64 seems like an unnecessary nuisance. I wish Microsoft had fixed it, but I guess it wasn't important for the short time that people cared about that OS.

Well, here's a minor update........I went ahead and create 6 partitions on a 250 SSD drive, installed Xp, Xp64, Vista, Vista64, Win 7 & Win 7 64; all in MBR partition style. And the boot menu is automatically created. All 6 op. systems are working fine at the moment 😀

Ah, interesting. I thought Windows didn't like being installed on logical drives.

Errius wrote on 2020-06-06, 17:38:

Ah, interesting. I thought Windows didn't like being installed on logical drives.

The boot partition must be primary, the operating system itself can be on a logical partition.