Triple Booting

Hi, just joined forum. I've been on vista and seven forums awhile. I have a PC with three drives. One has Vista (my favorite OS - I'm one of those retro types); the other two have seven. (all home premium). The original drive has seven HP 64, and the drive has a minor issue in that it takes 5 or more minutes to shut down. (It was 15 minutes, I made some progress with it). The other seven drive also has seven HP 64 and works flawlessly. I plan to keep the vista drive going as it's my workhorse. So, I'm wondering which seven drive to install W10 on. My thought is that by installing it on the drive that has the issue, that problem will go away as I will have a new OS. however, I don't want to lose the programs and documents on that drive. So I thought maybe I should install W10 on the other drive, see if it works out, and if so, then install it on the other drive. Sound like a good plan?

Other questions: could I roll back to seven on one of the drives, so I have vista, seven and ten all on my computer? Also, what if I put Linux on one of the drives? Will that mess things up?

Thanks,

michael

Why do you think the problem will go away with a new OS. Maybe the drive is going bad. First thing I would do is to backup anything on the drive that is important.

Are you just interested in "playing around" with the various OSs? Working with and maintaining three or four operating systems seems like more pain than I would care to tolerate.

IMO, Vista is one of the worse (its the "Jar Jar Binks" of the Microsoft family). I would make the Win7 the workhorse and play around with 10 (until you decide if it is stable and better or worse than 7). Use the third drive just for backups, and put an image of each of the other two drives/OSs on it.

If you have the hardware to run it Vista is fine if it has had all the updates. I would liken it more to C-3PO than Jar Jar Binks! It was so correct at enforcing EAC that I couldn't stand it! It was very pretty, compared to XP, which made it worse - I just wasn't ready for a strict nanny!

It doesn't sound like the drive at fault with slow shutdown times, but the Windows 7 installation, as you say, it will improve with a new installation. Find a program that will do a S.M.A.R.T. analysis on your disks to check their Health - Speedfan by Almico is one such program.

As long as you have space on your Hard disk, you can run one or more of many Linux versions with an installer under Windows which means that you don't have to do repartitioning - the Linux installation just chainloads onto your Windows bootloader. The installations just live in folders on your windows drive. I have 3 - Linux Mint, Ubuntu and Puppy, as well as Windows 8.1, Windows 10 insider, and Windows XP pro. They run pretty much as fast as native installations.

Country, thanks for the reply. You bring up a good point about the drive maybe being bad. At one point, it was bad - I ran WD diagnostics and it failed. But then I did maintenance on it and it now is fine except for the slow shutdown. Plus, it now passes all the WD diagnostics, even the extended test that takes hours. Still, I'm concerned that it could still be bad, as it is at least 6 years old.

Fafhrd: Thanks for the info on Linux. Maybe I will just leave that drive as is, and do as you say and mess around with Linux on it. I did that once however, and wiped out Windows, so I'll have to be more careful this time around.
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My thought is that by installing it on the drive that has the issue, that problem will go away as I will have a new OS.

No reason to believe that this will work -- any existing hardware failures on the drive will plague any new installation.

As for drives failing, I had a WD drive fail me suddenly last year. It was only a few months old. One day it worked fine and passed all the WD diags with flying colors. The next day, it was dead and would not work with any data recovery apps. Not bashing WD per se, just saying that an HDD can fail at any time, without any warning.

As long as you have space on your Hard disk, you can run one or more of many Linux versions with an installer under Windows

Not really, not anymore. There used to be WUBI (Windows Ubuntu Installer) and, in the Linux Mint world, Mint4Win (which was based on WUBI), but support for Wubi ended with Ubuntu 12.04 -- which is three years old now, and the Ubuntu forums strongly discourage its use. Furthermore, it won't work with GPT or UEFI -- which tend to be how new machines are configured.

My thinking too, Mark. I tried to install the Get Windows app on the drive, but it was not in the updates selected by Win update. In fact, for awhile now, certain updates will not install on that drive, and I'm thinking that is the reason I can't get the GW app - windows is not finding my computer to be ready for it. more indications the drive is bad. So I will copy any documents to another drive, and then that drive will be my "fun with Linux" drive. Until it dies.

Okay, I will do some disk analysis. there does appear to be something wrong with the boot drive, because this drive will only boot off of the Vista drive. A little more history: I did reimage this drive several months ago in an attempt to solve the problem. I used Macrium because Windows could not find the system image. I tried to rebuild the boot partition but to no avail. I guess that is why it will only boot from the Vista drive.

Anyway, I'll run some third-party tests.

I look forward to seeing the results!