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How to install Ubuntu, Windows XP and Windows 7 from scratch as triple-boot system

One of my HP computers has 3 hard drives: 2 of 250GB and a removable Media hard drive that is 300GB. Can I keep the Vista on first hard drive and easily install Win 7 on the second hard drive, and Win 7 64-bit on the third hard drive?

So if each physical hard drive can have up to 4 primary partitions, so this computer can easily have 12 OS'es on it? thanks.

Community
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nonopolarity
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3 Answers3

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Yes! You can do this. To make things easier, I'd actually reserve a small partition for a minimalist linux distribution. Then install linux last.

Why? Because linux grew up in an environment where it's much less likely to be the only operating system available, and as a result it has much nicer boot loader options. You'll get a nice graphical screen to choose which system to boot, and it should be able to detect everything automatically. If you don't like linux, you don't ever actually have to boot into it (except maybe to configure your boot screen). All you care about is the boot loader.

Windows, on the other hand, will relegate you to either using the bios to choose which hard drive to boot or editing the boot.ini file to show you a text screen (In XP, right click on "My Computer", choose the "Advanced" tab, and click the "Settings" button in the "Start and Recovery" area to see the screen where you can set that up.)

Joel Coehoorn
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You should be able to setup boot-loaders individually and select with the BIOS boot-loader which one to boot from.

Just be careful while installing the individual systems or you could land-up going in circles with the boot configurations (as you install one and then recover the other).

In fact, it might be a good idea to install each disk separately (with the others disconnected).

nik
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You are not limited to the four primary partitions for installing Windows. You can create an extended partition as one of the primary partitions, which acts as a container for other partitions called logical partitions. Windows needs to put its booting stuff on a primary partition, but will install on a logical one.

Also, What sort of removable Media hard drive have you got?

Windows can't (not sure about Windows 7 so maybe that should be couldn't) boot off hard drives connected by USB.

Neal
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