Plus the really nasty viruses seek out the Master Boot Record (MBR) which will affect your machine no matter what type of boot setup you have. If you’re really unlucky, you’ll contract one of the new rootkit iterations that infect the MBR so you won’t even know you have an MBR virus or a rootkit.
If you really want to do this properly, you’d run a VM instance on another box with Revert to Snapshot turned on so that every time you shut down the VM it returns back to the pristine state it was in when you started it. This means that whenever you update your virus definitions you have to take another snapshot, but that’s a small price to pay. Plus VMWare Workstation is free, but you can’t create VM images with it so you’ll need to find someone with the full VMWare license to create the initial image.
If done correctly, all OS partitions are labeled C:. No need to buy anything, all the tools to accomplish a true multi-boot are free. I have a backup of my MBR so no worries there. I use True Image so a pristine OS install is only 5 minutes away for any partition.
oh, like that. Naw, that is just a theoretical problem. Either I start the programs from the Start menu or double click on an associated file and via the registry opens the correct program. never ever had a problem with starting the wrong program. I can’t even imagine when that would happen?
whatever floats anybody’s boat … but I can’t remember having a single problem with anything related to the fact my computers has been multiboots since win98/XP. Of course there has been problems, failing hard drives, drivers for hardware and what have you but the boots are parallel universes so I can’t see why they would interfere. And they haven’t! One of the most error free part of my computer experience so far.
The only thing is if you don’t treat them as parallel universes … then you will have antimatter flying around!
The real issue is that you’re not really multibooting your way. You have to boot through the first OS partition to get to any other. Search for Goodell’s Multi-boot and have a shufty. You’re lucky to not have had issues, the problems arise when you do.
No, nothing is through anything else. I can take one hard drive out and boot from the one still in the computer, any of them. The b/w screen were I select where tor boot from is from BIOS, right? I can be wrong about that, but it’s not part of Windows.
There is also this little free program (EasyBDC or something like that) that I have installed on all three OS disks letting me rearrange which one is the default, change the names on the Boot screen and some other stuff.
Getting technical about this stuff is kinda out of my comfort zone. It works the way it’s supposed to and I think I understand what is up and down in the process good enough to not screw up, so … And it’s been working for ten years so I must do something right?
Ah, I see how you do it. To me, that’s a waste of space. Best practice is to have one HDD for OS partitions and data stored on a seperate drive/s. Especially important for a DAW so data can be read and written and not interfere with OS processes. Also, MS recommends the page file be on a seperate drive from the OS. I have 3 HDDs. 1st is 3 XP OS’s, 1 for internet, 1 for office and 1 for DAW. The second HDD I used for my Cubase projects and data storage. The 3rd I use for page file and storage.
I really don’t think about this very often. My first try had the OS partitions on different drives because one was SCSI (!) and the newer one wasn’t. Now I have all three OS partitions, programs partitions and a almost unused partition with “files” on one partition, all music projects on one and, all library files on one and the pagefile.sys file moved to some of the non-OS disk. So I can’t snatch a hard drive out anymore, I forgot. The OS and Programs are also mirrored just in case.
And there are some benefits as well! I can go “through the back door” like I did a while ago and fix stuff from one OS to the next. I just can’t remember what it was but I saved my XP boot from my WEB boot a few months ago. So for me it works great.
