
I'll add more examples/variations that better reflect a wider range of possibilities. the only example given is a pretty cheesy Windows-centric scenario that isn't very realistic for some of the very large hard-drives out these days. I was hoping to share some decent general tips that apply to multi-booting with *any* OS - but I also wanted to give concrete examples of possible scenarios. I started this page a long time ago with full *intent* to complete it - but the current state of things falls very short of my own expectations. and it's always nice to have a nice arsenal to work out alternative solutions. Every operating system has partitioning tools that might be helpful. My only assumption is that you have access to the disk tools provided with each operating system you are installing. The suggestions here are certainly not the only way to accomplish this boot scenario, but I hope everything is fairly easy to follow.

but the average computer user probably thinks in terms of hundreds of dollars on a personal budget. Everyone would no doubt love to purchase Sun UltraSparc machines or SGI hardware. I've always looked at PC's as a cheaper alternative to more exotic hardware - and I never put too much money into a single machine. I don't have much (any?) useful experience with SCSI drives on PC hardware. I could just throw a better 3com/Intel NIC in, but I'd rather use my single (shared) ISA/PCI slot(s) for a real modem. Also - I have pretty funky (PC-Chips M748LMRT) motherboards that are well supported under Linux and FreeBSD, but I'm still waiting for see Solaris drivers for the cheap onboard NICS (Davicom 9102 and SiS 900). I suspect the parititioning scheme more or less holds to FreeBSD conventions (slices, etc.) - but I can't make any informed statements about this at this point. I'd like to do more with multi-booting with Solaris x86, but I haven't looked into customizing the boot loader or alternative partitioning scenarios. and I'm sure you could set up almost any x86 OS in the virtual machine. Virtual PC seems to do a great job emulating very compatible x86 hardware. and figured out that I could set up (x86) multi-boots running Virtual PC - but I'm a bit limited by the fact that I don't have anything to simulate a floppy drive. I actually bought one of the new iMac DV's recently. but I only have a 1g SCSI drive - so that doesn't give me much room for either OS. I would like to do more with my Sparc 10 (maybe boot Solaris and a Linux for Sparc hardware). I've spent a considerable amount of time playing around with multi-booting various operating systems - mostly on PC hardware.

Multi-booting with various operating systems
