Booting from 5 drives and they all work...

N

NewB!!!

Member
OK, so I originally had a triple boot running using the EasyBCD 2.0 Worked great. What I had was a 500 GB drive partitioned into 2 - 250GB drives, One with XP Pro (originally on the drive). Then I dual booted Windows 7 on the second partition. I also had a 2nd (completely separate) drive with Vista installed on it. My third boot.
So I had an issue and had to do a NEW install of Windows 7 on the same partition it was originally on (shared drive with XP Pro - XP being the first on the drive). When I did this I ended up with a 4 boot called Windows earlier version (XP Pro). At the same time I had an issue with my second drive (Vista). It will not update for the life of me. I have tried everything (error 80070005). So I used Windows 7 to make a third partition on my already dual partitioned XP Pro, Win 7 drive. I installed a NEW copy of Vista onto the third partition. All seems fine. All work great. BUT!
If your still with me. I now have one drive partitioned into three drives. Partition 1 = XP Pro, partition 2 = WIn 7, and now partition 3 = Vista. All this is on one drive triple partitioned (500 GB drive).
I still have the second hard drive installed in the machine. So I now see 5 different bootable systems in my bios startup. They all work. I am thinking I can just unplug and pull out the second drive with win Vista installed on it. What about the original XP Pro. Can I just remove it from the Easy BCD and be ok?

Also can I add a 4th partition to my triple partitioned drive and install Ubunto on it?
 
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You can always remove an entry from the BCD if you don't want to boot that OS any more. Whether you can remove the OS too is a different question.
It depends which of your many partitions is marked "system" in Disk Management. (that's where all the boot files are which you're using to boot each of the partitions from).
If "system" is a partition you want to remove, then you'll have to move the controlling boot files first.
Luckily for you, should you need to, EasyBCD 2.0 will do it for you automatically.
(diagnostics / change boot drive)
 
Answer: Yes

Take out the second drive. Everything should continue to boot if your first drives' been in charge all this time. You can use Windows 7 disk management to make room for yet another partition to install Ubuntu to. When you install Ubuntu you want to select the advanced option near the end of install and have it install grub to the partition Ubuntu is on rather than the MBR.

Grab the latest build of EasyBCD beta and you shouldn't have any problems. Use the Add/Remove entries page to get rid of any XP entry you don't want and to add a working entry you can use to boot into Ubuntu.
 
...and if you're installing the latest version of Ubuntu (9.10), you'll want to use the Grub2 option in EasyBCD for the Linux entry.
 
Thanks for all the help guys. I will take a look and see what is system and what is not.

I am not using the latest Ubuntu, Where can I get it. I have a disk with a ISO image on it from a friend. Its almost a year old. I think its version 8 something.

Addendum:

The only drive in Drive Manager marked SYSTEM is my Win XP Pro D: This is the drive that has all three partitions on it XP, Win 7, Vista. I am looking at Drive Manager while booted into Win 7, Win 7 is marked as boot.
So I should leave the drive marked system and install EasyBCD 2.0 on my Win 7 partition and add and remove as necessary? I would like to remove the earlier version of windows from the boot menu and the second hard drive with Vista. The Vista should be easy enough. I will have to reboot in XP to see if the earlier version of windows is showing up in EasyBCD 2.0 I looked in msconfig (in Win 7) and I only see two Vista and one WIn 7. I chose Win & as my default.
 
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