Arch Linux

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From: Maidstone, UK

Registered: 2008-07-14

Posts: 19

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Triple Boot - Arch, XP, Vista - Important information

While it's still semi-fresh in my head, I though I should share my experience for anyone else trying to do this.

A friend of mine decided that Vista and Ubuntu were just not working out (well duh, he wasn't running Arch) and decided after seeing a howto somewhere that he should be able to triple boot all OSes. I saw no problem as grub as stupid and annoying as it is can also be rather clever at times, so we set off.

HP laptop with 2x250GB drives, although we'll only be using 1 in this setup.

Partitions as follows:

sda1 - 50GB - windows XP
sda2 - 100GB - windows Vista
sda3 - 200MB - /boot
sda5 - 4GB - swap
sda6 - 30GB - /
sda7 - the rest - /home

What we learned:

Now, for anyone else doing this, we learned an important lesson in this process. When installing Windows Vista, it will install a "Boot" directory along with a binary file called "bootmgr" into the first NTFS formatted partition it finds on the drive you are installing to, whether this be the Vista partition, or any other windows partition.

So because we installed XP first, once we'd completed the install of all 3 OSes, we were unable to boot Vista because it didn't put the files required for boot in the right place.

While XP is not multi-boot "aware" this doesn't matter because grub handles the booting of all the OSes, so install Vista first. Or, if you install XP first and then Vista and then Arch like we did, you'll need to move the "boot" dir and "bootmgr" file from your XP partition to your vista partition. If these files are not on the XP partition, boot the vista disk and choose "repair your computer" then after it finds the Vista installation. The box will then reboot. Boot off the disk again and select repair a second time. After it detects your partition, you should be prompted to fix the boot on it. Note that this will again copy the files needed for boot to the first NTFS partition. You should then be able to copy or move these file to the correct Vista partition and boot from grub.

Grub conf for windows looked like this:

# (0) Arch Linux
...
# (1) Arch Linux Fallback
...

# (2) Windows 1
title Windows 1
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

# (3) Windows 2
title Windows 2
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
makeactive
chainloader +1

Side note: I slapped this together while at work and while doing 20 other things, so let me know if it doesn't follow in a logical order.