installing multiple os. whats lilo? Nortons ghost?

[Friendly]

Hi people, thanks for the help. I want to install multiple os. 1st being 2000.
I have an unformatted hard drive. I pesume people now days just install their hard drives as a secondary hard drive and format them in disk management.
If I want to install 2000 on an unformatted hard drive, can I just run it from the install cd then choose repair and format from there before I install 2000? is that right?

Also If I happen to only have 2000 pro upgrade will this let me install on an unformatted hard drive from the cd?

If I am installing xp as the second o/s do I need to have a second primary partition? Do all the bootable partitions have to be primary?

Then I should install win 2003 as the next o/s then Linux?

What is Lilo. is this something that I need to use before I install Linux?

If i understand right Linux isnt installed as NTFs so the other hard drives wont see it. Is there a good third party software that will fix this problem? Free is always better!

Also why do I need to use a third party boot manager. Isnt there a normal way to boot between these systems.
If not then what is a good shareware boot manager that could be used or are there any?


Also I have some questions about Nortons Ghost.
Can I ghost over a bootable partion from one drive on to an unformatted drive or do I need to format 1st.
Do the hard drives need to be the same size?

Is there anything else that I have missed?

any help appreciated.
:beer::brokenheart::camera::clock::disgust:

 

[drag]

You always install the windows OS first.

This is because the windows stuff is not designed to play well with others, most of the time it will erase the Linux partition without asking. If you installed Linux first then you can use a program called Grub to fool Windows into thinking different partitions are located in different areas on the harddrive, thus making it easy to install Windows after Linux.

However it's a good idea to install Windows first.

If I were you I'd install win2k3 OR win2k, not both. They are so similar that their realy is no reason to run both of them unless your using w2k pro for gaming and w2k3 for serving, in that case i'd probably just install win2000 server and play games off of that.

It's not to say that you can't have multiple OSes. I've had 4-5 different OSes going at one time on a single harddrive.

Lilo and Grub are boot loaders. Lilo is the classic Linux boot loader and is fairly easy to set up. Grub is much more advanced then Lilo. There are plenty of documentation on both on the internet and both can be used to boot into windows.

Both Lilo and Grub are standard (either or, sometimes you have a choice) and can boot into most any OS you can imagine.


Not sure about ghost though.

There are some utilities to allow windows to see EXT2 partitions. So since EXT3 is backward compatable then I'd use EXT3 for your partitions.

However if you want to be able to go between both OSes with files, the easiest thing is to set up a fat32 partition since both OSes can read and write into that reliably.