- Feb 19, 2012
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I have a 3000 GB Western Digital Caviar® Green™, SATA 6 GB/s, 7200 RPM, 64 MB Buffer Size (WD30EZRX) hard drive. I have tried to triple boot Windows 7 x64 Ultimate Service Pack 1, Windows XP x32 Professional Service Pack 2 and Linux Ubuntu 12.10 numerous times, but apparently nothing seemed to work! At first, I just wanted to install Windows 7, but after installing the OS, I found out that it didn't recognize much more than 2 TB of the drive, that's why I installed Linux Ubuntu and made 2 NTFS partitions, both 1.3 TB with GParted so that I can install Windows 7 with it being able to recognize more space. Everything worked perfectly, in the installation procedure, Windows 7 recognized the NTFS partitions, I installed it on the first one and after finishing the installation, I found out that the second one was recognized as well. After installing Windows 7, I couldn't boot Linux Ubuntu, because Windows 7 screwed the boot.ini up and I had to install Linux Ubuntu again, after installing it again on the 128 GB space which was meant for it in the first place, after creating the 1.3 TB partitions, everything was fine and both operating systems were able to boot-up normally.. After a while, I started missing my old Windows XP and decided to give it a shot, since I had such a huge hard drive, and three operating systems wouldn't be a problem. I lowered the space of the NTFS partitions and created a new, 128 GB one just for Windows XP from GParted. When I booted up from the DVD-ROM, I got this weird BSOD error, I had the same error on another PC while trying to install Windows XP so I already knew how to fix it - I changed AHCI to IDE in my BIOS. Afterwords, everything worked and I was able to continue with the installation, when I got to the partition part, I found out that there was only 1 unallocated space which was around 800 GB (nor did I actually have such unallocated space, or even a partition with a similar size). Despite the fact I knew that Windows XP was going to screw everything up, I decided to install it first and install the other operating systems afterwords. I installed Windows XP and Linux Ubuntu afterwords. There were absolutely no problems booting up XP and Ubuntu, I went into GParted and lowered XP's partition to 128 GB. I have also made 2 partitions for Windows 7. I've removed Windows XP's boot flag from GParted to prevent problems when installing Windows 7 (with or without the boot flag, it wouldn't boot up properly after installing Windows 7). Everything seemed ready to go, but the problems were just beginning. When I was installing Windows 7, it recognized all the partitions and I installed it on the empty NTFS meant for it. After installing, Linux Ubuntu was screwed up again, but I had the option to choose between booting up from Windows 7 and Windows XP. Starting up Windows 7 wasn't a problem, but when I booted Windows XP, the logo came up and 1 or 2 seconds after this, the PC turned off. The change of Windows XP's partition size I've made from Ubuntu wasn't a problem, because it booted normally afterwords, but something got terribly wrong after installing Windows 7. After installing Ubuntu again on its partition, I had the option to choose between booting from Ubuntu, Windows 7 and Windows XP. Ubuntu and 7 worked perfectly, but I have never managed to boot from Windows XP properly, even after doing the same procedure a number of times and changing back AHCI, after installing XP. I'd be happy if you read this and am desperately searching for answers which might have a solution for triple booting both XP, 7 and Ubuntu properly. I'd be glad if someone responds. Thanks for taking a couple of minutes to read this!
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