[peteski]

Folks,

I had successfully got SL and the Dell provided version of XP up and running on the 160 HDD that came with my Dell Mini 10V working through Chamelon just fine, so decided to upgrade the RAM and HDD (2 GB and 500 GB respectively). I was hoping to get a dual OR triple boot going, with a shared fat32 partition. No Joy...

Tried a variety of things, read some more, tried some more things. I went back to the 160GB drive and it is still working perfectly. So this is my guess: The 4 partition limit in MBR is prohibiting my ability to run XP with even one more partition for shared space.

I'm guessing from all the guides out there for Win 7 triple boots AND NONE for WinXP indicates that WinXP is just too restrictive for such a partitioning scheme. Am I correct?

I'm contemplating buying Win7 at this point, but haven't quite crossed the threshold quite. Any comments?

Thanks in advance,

-Pete Liiva

[minimalpc]

Originally Posted by peteski

Folks,

I had successfully got SL and the Dell provided version of XP up and running on the 160 HDD that came with my Dell Mini 10V working through Chamelon just fine, so decided to upgrade the RAM and HDD (2 GB and 500 GB respectively). I was hoping to get a dual OR triple boot going, with a shared fat32 partition. No Joy...

Tried a variety of things, read some more, tried some more things. I went back to the 160GB drive and it is still working perfectly. So this is my guess: The 4 partition limit in MBR is prohibiting my ability to run XP with even one more partition for shared space.

I'm guessing from all the guides out there for Win 7 triple boots AND NONE for WinXP indicates that WinXP is just too restrictive for such a partitioning scheme. Am I correct?

I'm contemplating buying Win7 at this point, but haven't quite crossed the threshold quite. Any comments?

Thanks in advance,

-Pete Liiva

You will run into the same problem in Windows 7. The issue relates to the way that the MBR is synced to the GPT and (as you guessed) the 4-partition limit in the MBR. I have posted elsewhere (link) that I believe you can get around this by using an enhanced gptsync tool.