Windows Tools, Help & Guides

Mike recently graduated with a Bachelor's Degree in Information Systems and currently works as a data manager in the organ transplant department for a large healthcare company, mainly working with Oracle databases and systems administration and occasionally doing some web development. On the side he enjoys playing with the Android platform and Windows Media Center. He also spends time as an administrator on the Mintywhite Forums.

Mike's website.

In this guide I’m going to walk you through installing 3 or 4 separate operating systems on one PC – ideal for someone who wants to try out all of them on the same hardware or learn an operating system other than Windows. There are five basic steps to making this work:

1. Configuring your disk partitions to hold 3 or 4 different operating systems.
2. Installing your preferred version(s) of Windows.
3. Installing Mac OSX. (Not surprisingly, this is the longest step)
4. Installing Linux Ubuntu.
5. Configuring the GRUB boot loader to include all OS partitions.

Setting up Your Disk Partitions

This is the first and in my opinion most important step to setting up a multiple-boot system. Unless you are using third-party software, changing partitions can really screw up your system, as certain actions are not allowed in Windows’ Disk Management program (combining empty space to the left of the system partition, etc.). I like to set up the partitions for EVERY operating system before I start. This way there is no creating/splitting/combining partitions later in the process. There are three different disk managers for the three different types of operating system, so things could potentially get out of hand very quickly.

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In this guest post, Mike Sherwood explains how to run Operating systems virtually inside another operating system.

Virtualization is an up-an-coming technique that many companies are using to better use their resources. Most servers can only run one program at a time, causing most companies to have as many servers as programs they need to run. To solve this, creating a virtual machine on a machine saves money and uses the available resources to capacity. You can use this technology to your advantage to run a “Virtual PC” right on your desktop, for whatever reason you have. One of the best parts about this program is the ability to run a different operating system in a window right on your desktop. (I needed to run programs for work that are only compatible with XP, while running Vista on my computer) And best of all, it’s free! I’ll show you how.

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