Toque

Toque is an ASUS CUBX-E MB with 256Mb memory and a Maxtor 54098H8 40Gb hard drive (C/H/S 4982/255/63) on a Promise UDMA100 IDE controller. It is intended as a Win9x/NT/2000/Linux multiboot machine.

Multibooting

Linux is no problem. Newer versions of LILO can handle a full 32-bit block address, given the lba32 option, and so can boot anywhere in the first 2Tb of disk. Be sure to create a boot disk during the installation process, as this option currently has to be manually added to lilo.conf, and that requires you to boot it.

Multiple Windows operating systems must be installed most primitive to least primative. They all write files to the C: drive for startup even if they are installed in a separate parition. The primary partition must be formatted as FAT (for systems before Win95 OSR2,or NT 4) or FAT32.

You must let Windows partition the disk. It's not too bright and gets easily confused it the partition table isn't just so. Apparently C: must be the only primary partition, any additional partitions must be logical partitions. The primary partition must be partition 1 and the extended partition must be partition 2.

NT 4 less than SP4 will not recognize disk space above 8G, and apparently can't handle a bood disk (C:) that ends above the 2G point. You can install it to a D: drive, provided the C: drive ends below the 2G point and the D: drive ends below 8G.

2000 has a newer verions of NTFS than NT. Apparently 2000 will upgrade (without asking) any NFTS filesystems it finds during installation. NT versions before SP4 may not be fully compatable with the new NTFS, and no version of NT 4 will be able to use files that take advantage of new features. It is therefore recommended (by Microsoft) that you install NT 4 on a FAT partition.

The Actual Process

1. Fisrt, make sure that the disk is unpartitioned. You can use the linux install CD to get to their fdisk. It can deal with most anything, unlike the various Windows fdisks.
2. Next install DOS and a cdrom dirver. The Win98 setup must be run from dos.
3. Now install Win98. Configure it up enough to run windows update and install any critical updates.
4. Install Nt4 from windows into a new partition. If you are also installing 2k, or want to see this partition from 98, choose FAT for the filesystem. Upgrade to at least SP4, and preferably to the latest. You may need extra drivers to make it recognize a large disk. If you don't have something from the manufacturer, you can use ATAPI.SYS from SP4 or higher. Download from M$ and put on a floppy. The install will prompt you for additional drivers.
5. Install 2k from Windows into a new partition. Good luck with your hardware.
6. Get GNU parted or Partition Magic. You now have to re-size the extended partition so it goes to the end of the disk. Since NT 4 can only see 8G, that's where the extended partition ends.
7. You can now create more partitions to hold your stuff. Use one of the NT's disk manager to do this. When formatting, remember that NT4 can't do FAT32 and doesn't support all the features of NTFS 5, Win9x cant do NTFS, and FAT16 can't go bigger than 2Gb.
8. Install/upgrade drivers/software on each O/S.
9. Now install linux. After spending serveral days on the previous steps, and rebooting about 5000 times, this will be a treat.

Links

Configuring Multi-Boot Personal Computers

Large Disk HOWTO