Chapter 4: Multiboot Installation

Highlights

Blowfish and penguin
arguing over fridge space
roommates most vexing

As hard drives grow larger and larger, it's becoming more and more common to have multiple operating systems on a single disk. You can do this fairly simply with OpenBSD, if you follow a few basic guidelines. While you wouldn't do this on a network server, you might on your desktop or laptop, especially when migrating between operating systems. Sharing a disk between operating has two distinct problems. First, you have to divide the disk between the operating systems. Second, you must have a method to tell the computer which operating system to boot. We'll deal with both of these.

We're going to discuss the techniques, problems, and issues when sharing a hard drive between OpenBSD and any of four other popular operating systems: Windows XP Professional, Windows 98, Linux, and FreeBSD. The concepts are useful for other operating systems, however. If you want to multiboot, say, BeOS or NetBSD on your OpenBSD system, you can use the information given here as a guideline and probably do it without too much trouble.