Is this even possible?

Here is what I'm doing. I screwed up my vista bootloader by installing xp over it. How was this possible? Somehow from a previous goof, the vista bootloader was not on the drive that it was actually installed on, which leads to me reinstalling all the OS's LOL

What I have is a 250 GB drive which will be split into 5 partitions (I hear that 4 is the max, but vista seems to be ok with it, Windows 2k doesn't recognize more than 3 per drive).

I will first install Windows 2000 on partition 1
Then XP Home on partition 2
Then Vista Ultimate on partition 3
The Vista X64 on partition 4
Then finally Windows 7 build 7000 on partition 5

Yes, I am crazy

I'm currently installing Windows 2000 as we speak. The mistake I made last time was I installed 2k after xp and xp no longer booted.

So is this even going to work?

 

Yup, you're going from oldest to newest which will not screw up the MBR! Enjoy your quint boot, It's been a while for me but I did it with two drives.

 

yay! thanks:-D

luckly i have acronis true image and can preserve the MBR, so if I mess up something I should be able to recover quite easily

 

Mind you, I did it on two drives. You responded while I was editing my post.

 

well i started last night, I was able to get 2 of 3 OS working, I think because installing 2k after xp caused xp to quit working, but i guess there's only one way to find out.

One question that just popped up is about Windows 2000's 120 GB limit. Will Partition Magic be able recognize the entire drive? Or does Windows 2000 only format the first 120 GB of the drive?

 

I would lose Win 2K and go from XP on and keep to the oldest first plan or else you'll mess up your MBR and while it could be fixed, it needs a lot of work. So XP then XP64 then Vista then Vista X64 then W7. You can use PM to partition your drive but assign the letters through XP.

I can't answer your W2K question, I never used it.

 

Yeah, I decided to can 2k last night, though it's probably possible to do, but since you can only have 4 partitions on a drive, being that I want vista x64 and windows 7, windows 2000 is the weakest link

Windows 2000 will only see 120 GB, so in order to incorporate windows 2000 into the equation I would have to partition the drive before hand. Since my hard disks are as follows: 250, 500, 750, 1 TB, and 1.5 TB, windows 2000 is useless. There is supposed to be a hack that allows windows 2000 see larger partitions, but I also hear that it is not stable, so screw it.

I'm currently installing Windows Vista x64, and all has gone well so far. I appricate your help.

 

If you want to really have W2K for whatever reason, then you can run 'Virtual PC' on any of those platforms but it would be good to have 2GB of memory to do that. Good to see you making progress!

Now all you have to do is install a Linux distro on top of all that and you'll be all set!:-D


Juuust joking.

 

Yup, I use virtualPC, but they don't run quite as fast, they d run good, QX9650 does a nice job, but still from a quad-core to a single thread cuts in the performance a good bit. But I have ran Windows 95 surfing the net with old firefox 2.x, only problem with 95 it blue screens all the time. Amazing how far Windows has come...

 

Someone else who enjoys doing the impossible!!

I think the best one was when everyone told me that a C600 Dell Latitude, including Dell, couldn't run XP. The PIII 850MHz and 512MB of RAM may be enough, but, oh no, it's not possible. No real explanation given. Something about the mobo, I really don't recall.

Said "DAMN THE TORPEDOES", and I enjoyed using XP on it thoroughly!

LOL