Nowadays, the restoration of MBR for WIN 7 is relatively, actually very easy. You may use a portable software called BOOTICE to backup, restore MBR (Master Boot Record) and PBR (Partition Boot Record) at any point of time. No original WIN 7 Disc is required. Aslo, the same can be applied for Win 2000/2003/XP. Handy! right?
They have other useful features like BCD Edit, Grub4DOS Editor, etc. Help yourself to explore. It is just a piece of cake. The current release is V.0.9 with a tiny file size 164 KB.
They also have GUI in Chinese but I'm fine with their origional English version.
One of the most important things is after installation theprogrammay overwrite MBR. This is especially for microsoft windows installation. For Linux, always custom partition and look carefully for bootloader instaallation position.
Always try to install to the first one in what four partitions that can be seen by the bootloader. This simplifies a lot
How to install multi-OS in different partitions of a hard drive?
a) Using whatever partition tool to partition your hard drive
For instance
/dev/sda1 Windows 7 Chinese
/dev/sda2 Windows 7 English
/dev/sda3 Data
/dev/sda4 extension partition
/dev/sda5 SWAP
/dev/sda6 First Linux partition
.
.
.
/dev/sdax Last Linux partition
You have to pay attention to the size of each partition. Windows 7 partition should at least 50G bytes, other linux partitions may be at least 10G bytes. If you have only a few partitions to be used, then you may increase each partition size to fit your needs.
The partition tool I used is the Pmagic-5.1 which you can get it for free. I installed this program in my USB drive, which can be easily made bootable via the information shown in the website www.pendrivelinux.com.
You have to learn how to boot via any bootable USB drive with multi-ISO program as described in above website just mentioned.
b) Bootable devices - there are several options could be used for bootable devices to install OS.
1) The most basic one is to use CD-ROM/DVD-ROM disk and the corresponding drives.
2) The second method is to use USB thumb drive but you must have the tool to make your USB thumb drive to be both bootable and look like a CD-ROM/DVD-ROM. Only bootable USB thumb drive is not enough. Also it is very difficult to find the mass production tools for that particular USB thumb drive.
3) The first method is to a newly-developed device called i-odd 2501 from Korea. Zalman bought the license to make another similar product ZM-VE200, which is exactly the same as i-odd 2501. There are three operating modes - ROM, HDD, ROM+HDD. All the iso images could be install in the ROM partition with the folder name _iso. You may choose whichever iso image that you like to install it.
c) After having partitioned the hard drive, you may start to install any linux distributions first. For instance, since I would like to install Asterisk, I would like to consider to install CentOS first. At this moment, CentOS 5.6 is highly recommended although CentOS 6.0 has already been released.
During the installation, I choose the server mode to install the CentOS.
發表於 2010-8-8 09:06
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