Best approach for multi-booting a bunch of OSes?

[pmc]

I'm working on putting together the ultimate PC nostalgia machine (for me at least) - taking my childhood PC, decking it out with state-of-the-art components (for its time, 2006, plus a couple modern-day things like PSU and SSD(s)), and installing all the OSes on it. My plan is to multiboot the following:

• Windows
  • XP
  • Vista
  • 7
  • 8.1
  • 10
  • 11
• Linux
  • Ubuntu 8.04
  • Ubuntu 22.04

What's the best approach for doing this? Should I separate some of these systems onto their own SSD? How about bootloaders - would GRUB be able to handle this? Or should I use rEFInd + DUET? Anyone have any experience with such a crazy multi-boot?

 

I'm thinking maybe this would work:

• rEFInd + DUET bootloader
  • Maybe installed on a third SSD (or SD card/thumb drive) so that it doesn't get accidentally clobbered by an update?
• First SSD
  • Formatted MBR
  • XP & Vista
• Second SSD
  • Formatted GPT
  • The rest of the OSes

[SorryBella]

54 minutes ago, pmc said:

What's the best approach for doing this

the most sane way would be virtualization on everything and run Windows 10 (Windows 11 wont work natively without workaround which really is more convenient to do on VM). The 2nd most ideal would be all separate SSDs, and switching boot order every time you want to swap OS.

[Kilrah]

+1 for separate SSDs.

[cautiouslyoptimistic]

I suggest using MBR for all of it. Infact, if your PC is from 2006, your motherboard likely won't be able to boot GPT at all, unless you rocked a server or HEDT as a child lol.

I'm not sure with how things worked back in that era (regarding GRUB in MBR), I didn't have a lot of oppotunity to mess around then; My first machine that was 24/7 was a EFI-only Macbook.

That said, in MBR it's possible to have 4 active(bootable) partition per disk. That should cover it all across 2 disks. As windows makes 1-4 partitions per install based on various circumstances, you should fully populate the disk manually before installing anything, which will allow you to install 1 os per partition, with caveats regarding booting to recovery(I forgot what it was, never cared). You don't need any 3rd party tools, diskpart is good enough.

 

I forgot whether boot entries are added to existing bootloader upon install, in the situation that you install on disk B and bootloader already existing on disk A. I believe it does based on 1 past experience, but was uefi-csm/sketchy win8.1/win7/win10 boot on b560 (unsupported)

 

Edit: didn't see you had ubuntu listed as well, dear lord...

you might have to start by testing booting single partition ubuntu with grub in this case. The only past MBR unbuntu + windows install experience was always windows first. you could probably test everything in a VM first with old ubuntu and old windows for space effciency.

btw need clean windows isos?

Edited June 13, 2023 by cautiouslyoptimistic

[pmc]

5 hours ago, cautiouslyoptimistic said:

I suggest using MBR for all of it. Infact, if your PC is from 2006, your motherboard likely won't be able to boot GPT at all, unless you rocked a server or HEDT as a child lol.

You can create a small partition at the start of a GPT table and install GRUB to it, allowing it to boot with legacy BIOS - I've done it on this exact system. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table#:~:text=For limited backward compatibility%2C the,to as a protective MBR.

[pmc]

8 hours ago, Kilrah said:

+1 for separate SSDs.

My main issue with separate SSDs is that I only have 4 SATA ports, though I could probably use a good ol' slow PCI to SATA adapter. (my only PCIe port is taken by the graphics card)

[Kilrah]

Use a SATA dock/sled and just swap the SSDs.

[pmc]

30 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

Use a SATA dock/sled and just swap the SSDs.

Ooh, I like that idea. I'll see if I can put a hot-swap bay in my 5.25" slot.