adding more operating systems

[engineer]

hello.i have a 300gb sata drive with 4 operating systems.my question, is it possible to add another harddrive say 300gb and install more operating systems?

[Jester]

Do you boot into these OS's seperatly or are you using a virtual machine like VMware, Parallels, or Virtual PC? What OS's are they? I am assuming mostly different windows versions, and linux distros?

[engineer]

sorry jester,i had to break away.they are opened seperatly.they are also windows.

[kilgoretrout]

Short answer - Yes, of course you can do that. What bootloader are you using in your current multiboot system? If you are using any flavor of linux along with your windows OS, you are probably using either lilo or grub for a bootloader. It's just a matter of configuring your bootloader to boot the extra OSes on your new hard drive. You may also have to deal with your current bootloader being overwritten by the install of a new OS which frequently happens. Without some very specific details, it's hard to give meaningful advice since misconfiguring a bootloader can leave your system unbootable.

[engineer]

thanks for responding kilgoretrout.seems when i sign off someone has a response.my bootloader is a windows.how do i configure the bootloader to boot the extra operating systems?

[kilgoretrout]

Without some serious hacking, windows doesn't have a native bootloader capable of booting anything other than other windows operating systems. If you just want to boot several different windows OSes, there are ways to do that within the windows framework. But if that's all you want to do, you probably shouldn't have posted on the Alternative Operating Systems forum as this forum is dedicated to non-windows OSes.

I'm not that familiar with the windows way of doing what you want. In general, if you want to install several different flavors of windows, you should install them oldest to newest. For example, if you wanted to install winxp, win98 and win2k, you would install win98 first then win2k then winxp. If you do it in that order, I believe when you boot, you will get a boot selection screen with the choice of booting wither xp, win2k or win98.

[engineer]

okay thanks for your response kilgoretrout. i will give it a try.