Application Considerations

Along with all the file system considerations of a multiboot system, application installation problems also can arise unless you install each operating system and its applications in a separate partition. This is particularly true of the Microsoft operating systems because some of them share some of the same fixed directory names ("Program Files" is a notable example). Because of these potential problems, the following list of precautions is particularly useful:

• It's good practice to isolate operating systems whenever possible to minimize the impact of any catastrophic events such as system crashes, crunched file allocation tables, or applications that run amok. In other words, good disk partitioning is one way to increase protection for all the operating systems you run.

• Putting different OSes on separate partitions minimizes the chances that applications running on the different platforms will dump on one another's settings in unexpected ways.

• Many applications install files in the Windows or other common folders, and it's necessary to reinstall these applications under each OS to make sure that all files are copied where necessary. If you can tolerate the trouble, it's best to install the application into a different folder (on a different partition) each time. A common "Program Files" folder shared by multiple OSes brings the chance that OS-specific settings might give you trouble with other OSes.

That last bit of advice is a contentious one. Even your authors disagree. Bob thinks it's usually safe to use a single folder for an application's common files, and saves disk space, while Brian thinks that disk space is cheap, and having to chase down installation conflicts is an expensive waste of time. You may have to decide on a case-by-case basis after some experimentation.

If you find that an application acts erratically when installed into the same folder on several different OSes, reinstall it into a separate directory from each operating system. That is, install it onto the separate OS-specific partitions, or create a special application folders for each operating system (for example, \program files\win98\badapp and \program files\winXP\badapp, and so on) and install the problem apps there.