Quadruple boot questions

[ZhiYi]

Hi!
I plan to install winxp,98,RH Linux8 and FreeBSD 5 on a hard disk. Firstly,is it possible to install and dual boot 4 OS in a hard disk?

My plan is to install winxp first. THen install software like system commander or boot magic. Then followed by 98,Linux and freebsd. For linux and freebsd, their bootloaders will be installed in the first sector of the root partition.
Hopefully, the software in winxp will be able to detect the other OS installed.

Does this method work? Or are there other methods also?

[Hellmasker]

ive got somethign liek this running on another computer. (98, XP, mdk9)

first u shoudl isntall 98 coz it just wipes the mbr and puts a 98 bootloader in. Then xp coz it can detect 98 and will setup its own select thing between 98/xp/(optional DOS)

Then i installed mandrake (in ur case this woudl be redhat) and installed lilo as bootloader (some people dont like it but ive never had problems) This will have an option on ur boot screen which will take u to the windows seelection menu.

I assume bsd will be happy to install on whats left of ur hdd after this and jsut add itself into the lilo config.

[ZhiYi]

Hi Hallmasker,
thanks for the help!.....anyway,i have read from another forum that linux should be installed last coz Grub can detect the other 3 OS.
Besides,will the Freebsd boot loader overwrite the remaining bootloaders?
As for the linux/bsd bootloaders,i think they should be installed in MBR...is it correct?

[Dolda2000]

I agree that you should install Linux last. I know for sure that all Windows versions flush the MBR with their crappy boot loaders. I don't know about FreeBSD, though, but I know that GRUB can boot FreeBSD kernels directly, so it might be recommendable to boot everything through GRUB. GRUB recommends that FreeBSD is booted through its own boot loader, though, since the kernel interface changes sometimes and it can't guarantee to always being able to pass kernel parameters to the FreeBSD kernel. Just try it first, though.