Booting more than 4 OSes from a hard disk?

[Derek Ragona]

Master boot records are limited to four which is where the limit comes 
from.  It is theoretically possible to have the MBR point to a new disk 
location where you could have a boot manager that supports unlimited boot 
partitions.  But that requires all the booting is in software and outside 
the BIOS.

A simple solution is to use 2 disks.  Each with four partitions.  The 
FreeBSD bootmanager will offer to boot from disk2.  On disk 2 you can have 
your remaining OS's.

         -Derek


At 10:40 AM 8/8/2006, Girish Venkatachalam wrote:
>Dear all,
>
>I was wondering if the 4 primary parition booting
>limit still exists. Is it possible to have
>
>Windoze
>Linux
>FreeBSD
>OpenBSD
>NetBSD
>
>on the same box in such a way that we can boot into
>any of them?
>
>I am particularly interested in the x86 arch with IDE
>disks. I think this is possible on other archs with
>SCSI.
>
>What boot manager am I supposed to use? Does it
>require setting something on the BIOS? Does FreeBSD
>support booting from a point way off the first sector?
>
>Thanks.
>
>regards,
>Girish
>
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