Can I have two OS (XP & Linpus) on my Acer?

I wanna know if I can Have two OS at the same time? and boot them when I need it? I wanna have XP for play games, and some small progrmas that I cant use whit Linpus, but I dont wanna kill linpus, because I like this OS. So, is possible???

 

Yes. You can. It's called dual boot and there is plenty of info about this in this forum. All you need is use SEARCH...

 

a while back I decided to install xp and win98se on separate drives and dual boot from the machine. When I went to format the hard drives to remove the dual boot I kept coming up with problems... in a nutshell... it would not format in either win98se or xp with the end result that I took a sledge hammer to the damned computer and that was the only satisfaction I got out of that machine. If you want to end up with such problems... by all means go ahead and try dual booting. Unless you are an expert, or very, very lucky, you may be unable to undo what you've done.

 

It's terribly easy to dual boot these days. And is as easy to undo.... Using the SEARCH button mentioned above, and a little common sense is all one needs.

 

I agree, when I first got my box I put XP on until I felt comfortable running Linux as it was my first taste of this OS. :shock:
Now full converted and thanks to this forum undid all, now happily running just Linux and defiantly would not even put wine on. Will stay as far away from MS as possible. :lol:

 

That may be true when running something other than microsoft crapware. Even windows vista doesn't have any easy access to partitioning hard drives. Seems the only company that got it right is Apple. Tried to delete a partition using Vista and that went ok but then it would not free up the drive space. This is the kind of idiotic thinking that went into Vista. So I plugged the drive into my mac and within 5 seconds it properly repartitioned the space and freed up the deleted partition space. Vista couldn't figure it out and I gave up trying to use its useless help files for solutions.

Microsoft still doesn't have a clue about making repartitioning part of their OS. Trying to use help files in Vista to find out how to partition a hard drive was a waste of time. Even Linpus is easier to use when you want to erase the master boot record and that's saying a lot!

Now if you want to repartition stuff in Microsoft's crappy OS, you'll probably find it easier to use 3rd party software. XP and Win98SE couldn't repartition a hard drive either which is why I smashed the damned computer. Now, if I would have had a mac back then and an external HD enclosure it would have been a piece of cake to fix the problem.

 

I might also add that when trying to make a dual boot with XP, XP likes to destroy the other OS's boot info in the master boot record. So most of the forums I've read suggest installing XP last in order to retain the dual boot feature. When I installed XP on my Win98SE installation it was installed last because Win98SE was even less savy about dual booting.

Of course, if you install and make a bootable usb drive instead of using 2 hard drives, that's a different situation because of 3rd party software making it easier. XP however does not know how to install off an XP dvd onto an external USB hard drive. It always crashes when XP tries to boot off the dvd because it always assumes that it has to be installed on a drive C. Other than hacking XP installation files, there is no really easy way to make XP understand a little common sense about partitions.

With my mac however, it knows how to install on external firewire drives and making a bootable backup is all handled very easily by diskutil. In fact I have split my 500gb firewire drive into 3 partitions and saved 2 bootable Panther OS partitions and one bootable Leopard OS (as a backup to my laptop drive). Good luck trying to do that with XP unless you depend on 3rd party software.

 

Re: Can I have three OS's on my Acer as easlily as Macs?

As a 3rd response to multi-booting... how about triple booting! My Panther OS is backwards compatible with OS9. I run Classic 09, Panther, and XP at the same time!!!! Go to hell Microsoft! I hate you!!! I used VP7 to install XP and there is no way to uninstall XP without reformatting the drive once VP7 is updated with bug fixes.

Like I said, only Apple seems to understand that making the OS understand multi-booting shouldn't be next to impossible or require 3rd party software. Even Linpus Lite seems more capable at mult-booting than XP ever will be.

The 3rd party software to make xp boot off a flashdrive seems to require text installation because XP can't handle the task with its GUI. The one program I looked at (written in Linux) was compatible of multi-booting on a windows machine.

When it comes to having an OS multi-boot, Microsoft is last in making it easy.