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This should not be a duplicate, as I tried searching for this specific question and came up with nothing.

Is it possible to install multiple operating systems (like Windows 7, Linux) on the same machine, but without any one of them being the host operating system.

So, something like this:

Hardware
   OS-Manager of some sort
       - Ubuntu
       - Feodra
       - Windows XP
       - Windows 7

Whereas currently, the only suggestions I can find follow this scheme:

Hardware
   Host system (Windows 7, Linux)
        VMWare/VirtualBox
            - Ubuntu
            - Fedora
            - Windows XP
            - Windows 7

The reason, for those who are interested, for this question, is that I would like to avoid the problem where host OS gets broken, and thus restricts access to all the other OSs.

An Dorfer
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Andriy Drozdyuk
  • 315
  • Search for "dual boot", it will lead you on several resource about that – Nettogrof Mar 29 '12 at 20:10
  • I am not sure if I "can dual" boot Windows XP, Windows 7, 8 and Linux all on the same machine... – Andriy Drozdyuk Mar 29 '12 at 20:16
  • I am sure that you can. – Eroen Mar 29 '12 at 20:17
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    Search also for "bare metal" and "hypervisor". – Lord Peter Mar 29 '12 at 20:18
  • Oh I see, Type 1 Hypervisor looks like exactly what I need. – Andriy Drozdyuk Mar 29 '12 at 20:19
  • Is the expectation that all of these operating systems will run at the same time? Dual-booting is where you have two (or more) operating systems installed on the same hardware, but only one of them runs at a time. To switch between them you must shut down the active system and then boot into one of the other systems. – shufler Mar 29 '12 at 20:20
  • Nope, not at the same time. But as long as I can, say, remove all of them at any point, without depending on one being "main". – Andriy Drozdyuk Mar 29 '12 at 20:23
  • I've multibooted my desktop machine with XP, Vista, 7, Linux, Haiku, and ReactOS before. The most I've had at once was 4 OS's on the same disk. It's certainly possible, and doesn't require any extra software except the OSes themselves. – Ben Richards Mar 29 '12 at 20:26
  • But there must be restrictions - like the order in which you install them? Also - how would you remove one or another system? – Andriy Drozdyuk Mar 29 '12 at 20:30
  • Most Windows versions break the bootloader, so you have to reinstall that (quick and simple) after each Windows install. In my experience, most OS installers's parition tools break your parition tables too, so create paritions with a reasonable tool before installing anything to them. You remove an operating system by reusing the partition it takes up for something else and deleting the lines for it from the bootloader configuration. – Eroen Mar 29 '12 at 20:52
  • @Eroen Sorry for my newbness, but words like "partition tables" don't mean much to me. What are the tools that I can use? – Andriy Drozdyuk Mar 30 '12 at 02:17
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_disk_partitioning_software, I (using Gentoo) prefer (unix) fdisk, parted does a good job too. Windows ships with "Logical Disk Manager". – Eroen Mar 30 '12 at 14:56
  • http://superuser.com/questions/41595/how-to-install-ubuntu-windows-xp-and-windows-7-from-scratch-as-triple-boot-syst – Eroen Mar 30 '12 at 14:58

1 Answers1

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You will find that "OS-Manager of some sort" will either be a boot manager like syslinux, redboot or grub, which will let you pick one of the operating systems at boot; or a hypervisor like Xen or Hyper-V, which then proceeds to load a main operating systems (respectively some Unix and Windows) through which it then communicates with you and starts other operating system instances.

Eroen
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