mattmcspirit
Member
Hi guys,
I'm looking for a bit of help and guidance which will help me progress in my testing scenarios. I'm not new to dual-booting, from a pure Windows perspective, however throwing Linux into the mix, has thrown me a bit.
What am I trying to achieve?
Well, I have a PowerEdge T605, with 3 x 146GB SAS Hard Drives on a SAS 6IR Adaptor. All works fine, and is up to date with firmware etc. There is no RAID implemented - they are kept as 3 seperate drives.
Dell's BIOS & SAS config tool, whilst useful, don't seem to allw you to choose a particular hard drive on boot - I select 'boot sequence', and the only option I get is the first physical drive, so, a different approach is required.
What I'm looking to do overall, is Quadruple boot Windows Server 2008, 2008 R2 (Server 7), VMware ESX 3.5 U3, and Citrix XenServer 5. Now, I know all 4 OS's work with the hardware, and I have no problems with dual-booting WS2008 & R2 (these are both installed on the first Physical Disk, which is split into 3 Partitions - 1 for 2008, 1 for 2008 R2, and 1 200mb Partition that Win 7 WinPE creates to hold 'system files'). Currently, all is behaving itself, and I've used EasyBCD from the WS2008 partition to edit names, change default OS etc. Windows Server 2008 was the first OS to be installed, then 2008 R2. When inside the WS2008 partition, WS2008 is C:\, R2 is E:\ and 'System' is D:\.
So, I have the following:
Disk 1 146GB - Windows Server 2008 (70GB ish), Windows Server 2008 R2 (70GB ish), 200mb 'System' Partition.
Disk 2 146GB - Blank
Disk 3 146GB - Blank
So, I try XenServer 5 first. I install from the DVD ISO, it asks me to pick a disk to install to, and i choose Disk 3. Installation succeeds with no problems. Well, apart from the fact that when it reboots, I don't actually have a way of getting to 'Disk 3' for it's boot process to start!
If I go into WS2008, and look in Disk Management, I can see all 3 physical disks, and if i bring disk 3 (XenServer) 'online', i can see it's made up of 3 partitions (2 x 4GB, and 1 larger partition that takes up the remaining space (used for Virtual Machines i think)). I don't want to mess anything up so I make it offline again.
I open up EasyBCD, but in all honesty, I'm not sure what I'm doing - I tried multiple different options, using grub, not using grub, selecting Drive 2 Partition 0, Partition 1, using NeoGrub etc, but I'm really stumbling around.
Can someone help?
Is there a way to present a menu, perhaps using NeoGrub, that can just let me select Physical Disk 2 or Physical Disk 3 (1 or 2 in the OS numbering world I guess) and whichever disk is selected, the bootloader that is on there just takes care of it?
Hopefully if I get this one right, the ESX bit should be easy!
Thanks in advance
Matt
I'm looking for a bit of help and guidance which will help me progress in my testing scenarios. I'm not new to dual-booting, from a pure Windows perspective, however throwing Linux into the mix, has thrown me a bit.
What am I trying to achieve?
Well, I have a PowerEdge T605, with 3 x 146GB SAS Hard Drives on a SAS 6IR Adaptor. All works fine, and is up to date with firmware etc. There is no RAID implemented - they are kept as 3 seperate drives.
Dell's BIOS & SAS config tool, whilst useful, don't seem to allw you to choose a particular hard drive on boot - I select 'boot sequence', and the only option I get is the first physical drive, so, a different approach is required.
What I'm looking to do overall, is Quadruple boot Windows Server 2008, 2008 R2 (Server 7), VMware ESX 3.5 U3, and Citrix XenServer 5. Now, I know all 4 OS's work with the hardware, and I have no problems with dual-booting WS2008 & R2 (these are both installed on the first Physical Disk, which is split into 3 Partitions - 1 for 2008, 1 for 2008 R2, and 1 200mb Partition that Win 7 WinPE creates to hold 'system files'). Currently, all is behaving itself, and I've used EasyBCD from the WS2008 partition to edit names, change default OS etc. Windows Server 2008 was the first OS to be installed, then 2008 R2. When inside the WS2008 partition, WS2008 is C:\, R2 is E:\ and 'System' is D:\.
So, I have the following:
Disk 1 146GB - Windows Server 2008 (70GB ish), Windows Server 2008 R2 (70GB ish), 200mb 'System' Partition.
Disk 2 146GB - Blank
Disk 3 146GB - Blank
So, I try XenServer 5 first. I install from the DVD ISO, it asks me to pick a disk to install to, and i choose Disk 3. Installation succeeds with no problems. Well, apart from the fact that when it reboots, I don't actually have a way of getting to 'Disk 3' for it's boot process to start!
If I go into WS2008, and look in Disk Management, I can see all 3 physical disks, and if i bring disk 3 (XenServer) 'online', i can see it's made up of 3 partitions (2 x 4GB, and 1 larger partition that takes up the remaining space (used for Virtual Machines i think)). I don't want to mess anything up so I make it offline again.
I open up EasyBCD, but in all honesty, I'm not sure what I'm doing - I tried multiple different options, using grub, not using grub, selecting Drive 2 Partition 0, Partition 1, using NeoGrub etc, but I'm really stumbling around.
Can someone help?
Is there a way to present a menu, perhaps using NeoGrub, that can just let me select Physical Disk 2 or Physical Disk 3 (1 or 2 in the OS numbering world I guess) and whichever disk is selected, the bootloader that is on there just takes care of it?
Hopefully if I get this one right, the ESX bit should be easy!
Thanks in advance
Matt
