3 OSs, does it matter?

[King Mir]

I'm looking to get a new PC, and I'm planning to tri-boot it with Windows XP 64 bit, Vista, and Ubuntu. I'm wondering if having 3 operating systems would greatly increase my hard drive needs.

[Jamie Nixx]

I wouldn't think so, only one OS is going to be running at any one time.

[King Mir]

Well, all three will be using the hard drive at the same time, since there all installed on it. But they're not going to be running at the same time of course.

My concern is about having separate partitions for each OS, which is no doubt needed. Most, if not all, programs will not run on Ubuntu and Windows, but programs are easily the greatest users of my Hard disc space. Will I still be able to install them in a shared partition? What about programs that insist on installing themselves in C:\Program files?

[The Wise Monkey]

Triple booting is not a problem, just make sure you install the OSs in the right order - Vista, Ubuntu, XP, I think.

[King Mir]

Triple booting is not a problem, just make sure you install the OSs in the right order - Vista, Ubuntu, XP, I think.I'm not worried about that. I'm trying to evaluate my hard disk space needs.

The issue I perceive is that XP and vista may have many of the same programs. These programs would need to be installed separately, and likely to different locations. Some games may have trouble running on vista, and would need to be installed to XP only. Some games may insisit on installing themselves to the native partition. These kinds of issues may prevent me from pooling my hard drive space in a big shared partition, and therefor require large OS specific partitions. But since I can't predict how much space will be needed by each OS, I would have to resort to giving large partitions for all of them, which may mean that I need a bigger hard drive than I would otherwise.

[The Wise Monkey]

You wouldn't be able to have one partition for all the HDs because they each need their own boot sector. Plus, of course, Ubuntu uses a different file system to Windows (ex3 for Ubuntu, NTFS for Windows).

Games and other applications can all be forced onto a different partition, but you won't be able to share them between OSs because they each require different registry entries.

So, apart from that, your idea was good... :)

Space wise, Ubuntu takes up about 2GB, and it creates lots of its own partitions e.g. Home, Swap etc. Vista takes about 10GB with just the install, but the minimum space is 20GB, and XP is about 2GB as well.

Just out of interest, why are you triple booting anyway? Are you going to be using XP for gaming, Vista and Ubuntu for general use?

[King Mir]

Just out of interest, why are you triple booting anyway? Are you going to be using XP for gaming, Vista and Ubuntu for general use?Mainly because I just want to try it out.

I don't trust vista, because several people that I asked said they would not install vista because It is so new and untested. But at the same time it is supposed to be better than XP. So I figured, since it's free for me, why not get both.

Ubuntu I want to get mainly so I can get used to using linux. It also broadens my software choices.

Yes, I'll probably use XP for games mostly, since most games so far are written for XP. Beyond that I don't know how much I'll use each OS.

[The Wise Monkey]

That's fair enough, I guess. I dual-booted XP and Ubuntu for ages, but then wiped it all and upgraded to Vista. :)

My advice would be to either use one big HD or several smaller ones e.g. one for the OSs, one for storage etc. With the one big drive, you would need to divide it up between the three OSs and some storage space as well. You should probably allocate about 50GB to each OS, depending on what programs you are going to install.

My current setup is a 75GB WD Raptor (the 10,000rpm one) with Vista on it and a 250GB storage drive - this is a good idea, because the OS loads much faster than with a standard HD. :)