Seeking to boot XP, W8 and Ubuntu 12 all from the same brand-new SSD.

OldTom

New Member
Several years ago I needed help with a dual boot of W7 and W2K. EasyBCD – and this forum - saved my bacon. Now I have larger ambitions.


I am building a new box where I plan to triple boot from a 256G Samsung Pro SSD. Among other requirements, the new box will need to use WinXP to support an old but useful HP3330 scanner. (It seems that no later OS works for this purpose.) The old box’s 0.75T NTFS system HDD will become the data drive in the new box for the existing apps and any new ones in the future. Do I need to create a partition on this 0.75T HDD for Ubuntu data files, and, if so, how should I format this – FAT32? Below is the list of tasks I envision, in order of execution, with some questions within the text and at the end.


First, I plan to partition and align the SSD, using Partition Wizard 8.1.1.1, (unless something else [Gparted?] is better) in this order:
15G WXP
100G W8 NTFS?
100G Ubuntu 12 - FAT or ext4?
8G Ubuntu swap
33G Unallocated (overprovisioned; whether/how to format this?)
Use EasyBCD to create & adjust boot menu, as needed.
Install OSs in above sequence.
Install 0.75T HDD in the new box; before installing, make it unbootable.
Install existing apps and future ones to the SSD partitions containing their OSs.


Are the above objectives practical? Does my solution make sense? Is it complete? How can it be improved?

Now I want to thank the authors of the excellent white papers and MultiBooters.com.

Additional thanks in advance for advice, warnings and improvements

Tom
 
That sounds fine - you don't need FAT32 for the data partition, NTFS on Ubuntu works better and doesn't have those same limitations. Unless you mean as the Ubuntu root partition? Definitely stick to a Linux filesystem for that.
 
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