So at work I got this brand new Dell Dimension 9150 with 2 GB RAM and 2 160 GB SATA Drives under the hood for developing a fancy crossplatform client-server thingy. Other non-vanilla properties include USB-only (wireless) keyboard/mouse (no PS/2 available), wireless network (though cable would be available too).

160x2! Now that should be enough space to get all of the latest OSes up and running. Sure it is... but it's not all that simple. Things you should know firstYou could of course start right away and at some point find out that you screwed it all up and start over again. Trial and error, that's my favourite way to learn. Or you could first plan everything and smoothly walk through the installation. In my case i wanted to install WinXP, Ubuntu Linux, FreeBSD and a 'modified' Mac OS X.

1.1) Partitioning
I've never sliced a harddisk into more than 3 partitions, so that was my first big lesson. You can't have more than 4 primary partitions on one disk! That's because the MBR is that small, it can't hold more information. Which may be a problem on a multiboot-system. Fortunately 'real' ;-) OSes like Linux have no problem running on extended partitions (partitions created in primary partitions). Windows seems to insist on a primary partition.

1.2) Sharing Data
I planned to use one harddisk as OS-disk and the other one as data-disk, accessible by all platforms. So what filesystem should i use? Windows only likes NTFS and FAT, the other systems only have unstable NTFS writing support, so what's left is FAT32. Woohoo, something every OS can use! But wait, although the name 'FAT' sounds like a promise to support big and huge files and partitions... things may not be as they seem.

While I happily start up the format utility, I receive a new infusion of knowledge: FAT32 partitions only up to 32GB, that's Microsoft's way, bigger FAT32 partitions are plain wrong! Oh... well. Good that we know that Microsoft's way aint the only way to go. So we quickly do a google and find out that there are plenty of Linux and even Windows utilities out there doing just that: formatting my complete 160GB serial harddisk with the FAT32 filesystem. Great.

Soon enough I'd regret it, first, because FAT32 has a filesize limit of 4GB. Which interestingly doesn't prevent Linux from writing larger files, reading/using them in Windows is a problem though. Second, because FreeBSD doesn't like FAT32 partitions bigger than 125GB.

2.) BIOS
I installed Windows XP without a problem (you always should install Windows first, as it overwrites any existing bootloader), booted the Ubuntu CD and was prompted with the partition selector - without showing any partition. Uh-oh! Looks like my harddisk are RAID-0 and Ubuntu (or Linux in general?) wouldn't read RAID-0. Which I don't want anyway, I want to fully use both harddisks seperately.

After messing with my BIOS settings and consulting the omniscent Google, I find out that the RAID-settings are managed somewhere else. In my case i have to press Ctrl+I on restart to access the RAID-menu. The separation of the twins works without any grave complications. Windows is set up again quickly (only a Dell-branded Windows CD works though, the Microsoft one locks up regularly) and Ubuntu now is no longer ignorant of it's new roots. Linux is installed using extended partitions, because we already have 4 occupied and we still need a Swap partition.

3.) GNU's not Unix
Neither is Linux. So if you thought (like I did) bending FreeBSD requires the same steps as riding the Linux horse, you're wrong. I have to remind that my Dell box probably aint that vanilla - and device drivers still are very much a Windows domain, though Linux is catching up quickly and FreeBSD just doesn't have a community as big to support all non-standard setups. The latest FreeBSD supports USB-keyboard. Thumbs up!

Along the way I'm asked on what harddisk to install. After figuring out the BSD way of enumerating harddisks, i'm presented with an fdisk like screen. I select the soon-to-be FreeBSD partition and am told that FreeBSD will create it's own partitions inside. That's fine, do as you will! Nothing's fine... I receive an error. I don't know how i got the idea, but i stopped the installation, formatted the bsd-partition with fat32, restarted the installation and selected it, and everything worked like a charm. I haven't used FreeBSD a lot since (I only installed GNOME and played around a bit), so I still don't have my wireless network up and running.

4.) Legalise it!
Now I looked for the infamous Mac-on-Intel. I found forums and how-tos and was referred to some mystical 'deadmoo'-image. I followed the instructions and 'dd'ed the image onto the last partition. Rebooted into Mac OS X, trembled of excitement, was presented with the Apple logo and broke down in tears because the screen froze and showed a no-no icon.

You don't know how much I tried to fix it. I loaded the image using VMWare, deleted and replaced files. Tried other images... I even opened my Dell and reordered the IDE and SATA devices. Along the way I also tried to change the BIOS settings on SATA devices. I changed it from 'Autodetect' to 'Combined' and lo - there it was, my Dell's reincarnation as a Mac.

I rebooted Windows using the same BIOS setting, worked like a charm (only the Windows logo wasn't shown on startup, which didn't bother me at all). I rebooted Ubuntu and got an error, couldn't find root. I rebooted FreeBSD and my harddisk made a sound like it was rotating at speed of light, so I quickly pressed the power button. Which is why I changed my BIOS settings to 'Autodetect' again of course. Whenever I want the Apple flavour i change my BIOS settings again. Still got no wireless networking and higher than 1024x768 resolution though.

5.) Other Systems
In my operating-system-mania of course I also checked out other OSes. Seems like BeOS doesn't like more than 1GB of RAM, so I didn't try it. There's still VMWare anyway... and QEMU of course.