Can a PC with 1 hard drive have 5 partitions be able to boot up XP, Vista, Windows 7, Windows 7 64-bit, together with a disk recovery partition?
My HP computer has 1 hard drive, and 1 partition has the Windows Vista on it. One other partition is also a primary partition, which has the Recovery Data on it.
It is said that a hard drive can only have 4 primary partitions? In that case, can 3 other OS'es be installed on the computer? I hope to install:
- XP
- Windows 7 32-bit
- Windows 7 64-bit
It looks like 3 more primary partitions are needed -- is there a way around it? .
Update:
can you install Windows 7, Windows 7 64-bit, XP, etc, on extended partition? I used the Disk Management tool on Windows 7 and it won't initialize the 5th partition, saying it is too many, so how can it be made into extended?
also, a reason I wanted to install multiple OS'es is to see how fast programs run on them natively.
Solution 1:
You can only have 4 primary, but you can have as many extended partitions as you want (well, up to 26 before you may start have problems in an everyday computer example).
This shouldn't be a problem, but frankly, I wouldn't... you will just be looking for more trouble than it's worth.
If I was you, and your PC is of reasonable power, install Windows 7 64 bit or XP and then install Virtual PC or another virtualisation software and run it that way.
I can understand situations where you will want to have separate OS's, and I used to do it all the time (the more the better!) but I personally just don't think it's worth doing unless you have a real specific reason for it.