On 03/03/11 4:10 AM, Phil Savoie wrote:
When booting a system with multiple operating systems, it is true that only one operating system may be in use at one time, however, those other operating systems are installed on the disk in partitions. These partitions may be mounted like any other filesystem, hence the ability to use them while a single instance of an operating system is running. It's all done via the /etc/fstab and through mount options.
I am not a fan of multiple booting.
Multiple OS's can make a mess of file system permissions if you're not careful. For instance, if you have multiple linux installs, you'll need to go to some troubles to ensure their /etc/passwd stays in sync or they'll make a mess of each others ownership.. and mapping linux user numbers to Windows user ID's for NTFS is non-trivial.
Computer security overhead is multiplied times the number of OSs. If you haven't booted that windows system for a few weeks, expect to spend a good hour with Windows Update, Antivirus updates, web browser & plugin updates, adobe, etc etc before using it next time. A network configuration change would have to be made to all the different OS's. etc etc.
and, when all is said and done, your system's bootstrap sequence becomes a rather fragile house of cards.