johnsfine,

Can you be more specific on how the OEM boot can affect the size of the cloned hard disk?

I have not run into such a problem myself. The boot code should always be inside the boot sector of a partition. The OEM boot code is only needed when the machine is first powered up for installation of the OS. Once a MS WIndows has been installed it will need its own boot sector code (/nt52 for WIn2k/Xp and /nt60 for Vista/Win7) and this can be done by switching the active flag from the OEM partition to the new Windows partition or any other Linux partition. The original OEM partition is no longer needed for booting purpose.

In cloning the target is forced to have the same geometry as the dource disk. This is seldom a problem especially in LBA mode most hard disks will have 255 heads and 63 sectors.


vinaytp,

In my opiniuon having a common /home for all Linux is not a good idea as the desktop settings cannot be rigidlly enforced in each distro. You will have to spend more in fixing the problems than using the OSes.

Yes, I understand. But as this is for personal use, We would not have many users created. Only thing I need to take care is UID and GID should remain same in all /etc/passwd files, so that there will not be any ambiguity and access issue while accessing file created in another Linux distro.

Other wise mounting and unmounting of the /home of other Linux OSes would be tedious task every time when we need the data that is stored in other /home. I have experienced this.

thereotically it is possible to boot all the operating systems available in one machine,don't know whether possible practically.

ultimate_linux,

What reservation do you have that there could be practical difficulties of booting and operating several systems in a PC?

have a look at mine, I am done with too many systems,you cant keep them all up to date,better a few and spend more time on them... LOL

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