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| How to create a multi boot Vista-XP-Linux system using XOSL |
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July 2009
by: soundoflight [at] hotmail |dot| com
This brief guide will explain how to set up your computer to safely run multiple operating systems, including windows Vista, in a multi-boot setup. There are many ways to acheive multi-booting, but my personal favorite is to use a third party bootloader that hides the various windows installations from each other. From a stability perspective, I much perfer this to relying upon windows or even Linux to manage the boot process.
An exellent resource for learning about the multi-boot process from a Vista perspective can be found here:
http://www.multibooters.co.uk/index.html
XOSL is almost 10 years old, but since the low level fundamentals of booting have not changed much during this time, it's still an excellent choice as a boot manager. It still looks great, has great features like partition hiding and password protection, and its reliability is proven. Plus, it allows you demonstrate your mad computer skills. Nuf said.
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| Tools you will need |
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1) A blank hard drive / a hard drive you are willing to lose all the data on. In theory this guide could be adapted to work with your existing windows partition, but I wouldn't recommend it unless you really know what you are doing.
2) UBCD - the ultimate boot CD, an extremely useful FREE tool. I can't imagine life without it. If you get nothing else from this page, at least pick up this badboy. (http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/). This CD contains ALL of the programs you will need, including Ranish Partition Manager and XOSL.
3) Vista DVD, XP CD, Ubuntu Linux CD + VAILD WINDOWS KEYS
4) Some sort of understanding of what is going on here. Unless you are comfortable with partitioning disks and clean installing Windows, don't even think about trying this. Read the documentation for XOSL (http://www2.arnes.si/~fkomar/xosl.org/), Ranish Partition Manager, and as many other mutli-boot guides as you can.
5) Access to a second computer will make your life a lot easier during this, to access manuals, information, drivers, etc.
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| Steps to set up your system |
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1) Backup / Plan / Prepare. Before you start it's probably a good idea to update your motherboards BIOS, or at least check into what features the latest BIOS will offer you. My laptop came with OEM Vista, so I extracted the key from windows before I formatted using the ABR tool (http://directedge.us/content/abr-activation-backup-and-restore). Optionally, you can use the key on the bottom of the laptop and call microsoft to get them to activate it (but I'd rather not give the bastards the pleasure).
2) Change the boot order in your BIOS to boot from the CD first.
3) Boot with UBCD and wipe the hard drive clean using the tool of your choice. I'd recommend just zeroing the entire drive (one pass).
4) Boot with UBCD and run the Ranish Partition Manager.
- Use the wizard to create ALL of the partitions you plan to make on this drive.
- After you create each partition, remember to align the paritions with the cylinder boundaries. Make sure that all partitions start at minimum head and sector values (0 & 1), and end at maximum head and sector values (254 & 63). Also don't save or format anything until you make all the partitions. This is the one step of this process you don't want to mess up on.
- Ranish doesn't have NTFS, so just pick FAT 32 for the windows partitions and leave them unformatted (we will use the windows installers to format these). In fact, leave all the partitions unformatted EXCEPT for Pri-1 (XOSL), which you should format to FAT-16 using the "f" key.
- Here is my example of how I set up my system:
# Type File System Size
1 Pri-1 FAT16 (XOSL) 32MB
2 Pri-2 NTFS (Vista) 40GB
3 Pri-3 NTFS (XP) 30GB
4 Pri-4 Extended 86GB
5 -Log-1 NTFS (Shared Data) 64GB
6 -Log-2 Linux ext3 (/) 10GB
7 -Log-3 Linux ext3 (/home) 10GB
8 -Log-4 Linux Swap 2GB
- note: due to the aligning of the boundaries I also had small unused spaces before and after 1 and 8.
5) Reboot with the Vista DVD and install Vista. Use Vista to format the partition you made for it. Reboot about 1000 times to install Vista (1), the hardware drivers (2), and Vista windows updates (3).
6) ****CRITICAL STEP**** You must now note the Vista Disk Signature before proceeding. Boot using the UBCD and run the PTS DiskEditor tool. Right near the start of the drive (which is the MBR section), you need to note the 4 byte hex disk signature code located at 0x01b8-0x01bb. For example, on my computer these were "ED 66 35 8D". For those that don't understand hex, just go to the row called "01B0" and the 9th, 10th, 11th, & 12th numbers (of 16) in the row are what you want. It might be a good idea to save a copy of the entire MBR at this point.
7) Boot from the UBCD and install XOSL to the 32MB partition you created and formatted for it. You do not need smart boot manager. Explanation of the options can be found in the XOSL documenation.
8) This step is optional, but it's nice to know things are working. Create a boot option for your Vista install in XOSL, then reboot with the UBCD and use the PTS DiskEditor to rewrite the 4 byte disk signature that XOSL unfortunately blanks out during it's install. Take out the CD, and you should now be able to boot Vista from XOSL.
9) Now we are ready for our next install. First run the UBCD and run Ranish to hide the Vista partition. Then reboot with XP installation CD and begin the install. The XP partition will show up as C: drive. Format it to NTFS and complete the install process. Again do the drivers, updates, etc. XP over-writes the XOSL so it is temporarily gone.
10) Boot from the UBCD, run XOSL and choose to "restore" XOSL. Setup your Vista and XP boot options, making sure you hide them from each other (this is very important!).
11) Boot from the UBCD, again run the PTS DiskEditor, and restore the Vista Disk Signature. You should now have a fully functional dual boot Vista-XP system! Format the shared NTFS partition from windows and it should appear to both windows installs.
12) Now you can add Ubuntu Linux into the mix. At this point, take this guide with a grain of salt because I know nothing about Linux. First I made some back ups, saving on a flash drive:
- A copy of my current MBR.
- A copy of my Ranish parition table (this one was a bit tricky since I had no floppy drive... I just took pictures with my digital camera... meh it works).
13) Put in the Ubuntu CD and choose install. It might be a good idea to try hiding the windows partitions, but I think Ubuntu will find them anyways.
- Choose to specify your partitions manually.
- Don't miss the small "Advanced" box at the last step to choose where the GRUB bootloader will go. If left to its own devices GRUB will kill XOSL. Stick it into the same partition as your root (/)
14) Add the root (/) partition to XOSL and you should now have a fully functionally triple boot system. There is probably some tinkering around with GRUB and Ubuntu necessary here to hide windows fully, but I don't know enough yet to do this.
15) Rejoice that I wasted so much time on this so that you don't have to :)
>'-')> <('-'<) ^('-')^ v('-')v <('-'<) ^( )^ (>'-')> ^(^-^)>
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| Feel free to share this guide - all I ask is that you leave it |
| intact and don't steal credit for it. |
+=================================================================+
Listen to the man who seeks the truth. Ignore the man who has already found it.
|
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