Rebuilding Mulipupose Test PC

Darc

Member
Hello all,

I have nice high spec PC and it's in the barebones state so no OS at the moment. I have 2 by 1TB HD and 8g of Ram on an i5 quad processor. I want to start with
1. XP pro and then
2. Vista,
3. Win 7,
4. Small Business 2008 server,
5. 2008 server (full version)
6. up to 8 OS'es

Can someone direct me to information as to how to start on this project or give me some guidelines as what to do first etc. I am technically competent just never used easyBCD. I want to start with XP pro as I am waiting for my other OS'es to arrive. Thanks in advance

Darc
 
Well sadly the fact that you have 8GB of RAM means that you will have to use XP X64. As using a 32 Bit OS with that amount of RAM means that you will lose over half of it. XP 32 Bit by default cant handle more than 4GB of RAM. It is a limitation of that architecture.

Anything before XP will have the same results. You would be better off running them in VM.

Just install XP and when you Get Vista install that and work in that order. By default Vista, Win7, Server 08 all use the BCD and should add the entries by themselves. The only reason you would need EasyBCD would be to add an entry like Linux.
 
Well sadly the fact that you have 8GB of RAM means that you will have to use XP X64. As using a 32 Bit OS with that amount of RAM means that you will lose over half of it. XP 32 Bit by default cant handle more than 4GB of RAM. It is a limitation of that architecture.

Anything before XP will have the same results. You would be better off running them in VM.

Just install XP and when you Get Vista install that and work in that order. By default Vista, Win7, Server 08 all use the BCD and should add the entries by themselves. The only reason you would need EasyBCD would be to add an entry like Linux.
Thank you Mak 2.0. Just a clarification here, If I install XP Pro 32 bit first, does this lock out the 4gigs of memory to all the other OS'es ? If it does how does it do this as the BCD is in control before the OS loads. Thanks again.
 
No it doesnt lock all OS's to the 4GB limit. Only the 32 bit OS will be locked to that limit. So when you install the other versions of Windows 64 Bit they will be able to use the full amount of RAM that you have.
 
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