Installing and managing multiple OS on multiple hard drives

[s2c]

Hello,

Currently I have Fedora and Win XP dual booting off my SATA 80GB hard drive using GRUB. I also have a 250GB IDE hard drive and two 500 GB USB external hard drives.

I would like to install Win XP and Red Hat/CentOS on the 80GB drive and install Solaris 10, FreeBSD and may some other OS just to try it out on my external USB drive.

My question is how can this be done? Can I select the OS I want to boot into using GRUB? Can I have 2 OS on the main hard drive and the rest on my external hard drives?

How do I go about the installation?

My PC config is :

AMD Dual Core X2 4200+
2GB 800 Mhz RAM
NVIDIA Nforce chipset AMD Motherboard
Hard drives as mentioned above

[devils casper]

Hi and Welcome !

You can install an many distros as you like and it doesn't matter if you install those in internal or external disk.
First of all, check if your Machine's BIOS supports booting up from External device.

[s2c]

Thanks for the reply. Yes my BIOS supports booting from external drive. I was thinking of the same but wasn't 100% sure it would work. I'll try it out. Thanks again!

[MikJP]

Thanks for the reply. Yes my BIOS supports booting from external drive. I was thinking of the same but wasn't 100% sure it would work. I'll try it out. Thanks again!

You might run into problems with GRUB, if you boot your computer without the external hard drive.

And remember that BSDs and I suppose Solaris need a primary, not an extended partition.

[kesphils]

You might run into problems with GRUB, if you boot your computer without the external hard drive.

And remember that BSDs and I suppose Solaris need a primary, not an extended partition.

In my own case, I would like to install Win XP and Red Hat/CentOS on the same 80GB drive. and i want to be able to boot from any of them of my choice. pls how do i go about it?

[devils casper]

In my own case, I would like to install Win XP and Red Hat/CentOS on the same 80GB drive. and i want to be able to boot from any of them of my choice. pls how do i go about it?

Hi and Welcome !

You dont have to do anything special. Create free space or Partition(s) and install RedHat/CentOS. Installer will detect Windows OS and setup dual boot itself. You will have choice to boot either OS at startup.
Do not change anything in Boot Loader ( GRUB ) section. Default settings work fine.