operating systems!!!

question:-how many OS can a PC have?
i know some of u may know the answer-
answer-5 i.e.one primary and four secondary.
now the question is how can any one load 5 primary OS on a single system?
a friend of my has done it on his PC ,but i don't know how he did it?
if anyone can answer?

i wanna add one thing my friend is on a tour so i get the answer when he comes back but i am just too curious to know.

Actually, I may be wrong, but don't think so, the answer to how many OSes you can have is only limited by that amount of HD's you have. Depending on the file system you may only be able to have one primary and another extended partition divided into four logical drives, but if you add more HD's the sky's the limit. How to do it, heh , know your boot loader, learn how it works and how to configure it, or use Partition Magic. JMO

Actually, you can put up to 27 (I think that was the number) on to one system. And, IIRC, it was Extended Operating System Loader

Here are some other bootloaders that could help:

http://www.tsden.org/ryutaroh/extipl/extipl.html
http://gag.sourceforge.net/
http://www.bootmanager.com/

For linux on iMacs:
http://www.ping.de/sites/zagadka/poof/

Hope it helps.

Ah, the definative answer. . .thank you Ms Mittens, can always count on you for factual information. :)

Wow, 27 operating systems... now the question is, what 27 os's to load.... ;)

Windows, OS/2, FreeBSD, Solaris, DOS, Slackware, ..... Now that would be a boot menu from hell... :D

Yeah, have to set the timeout to more'n 10 seconds on that one.

I'll say. I think they even had things like Novell and OS/2. I also think they had every windows, every linux and every unix variant on it. I remember originally seeing the article in Maximum PC.

Using virtual machines (like VMware) I think that even this limit could be exceeded because you don't have to mess around with bootloaders. Having enough HD-space, RAM, CPU-Power and a reliable Host-OS you could even run them simultaneously.

27 is a lot of OS's, however wouldn't they start confusing each other? I mean if your loading 5 different Linux versions then how do they know which kernel to load? And is it possible to load multiple OS's at the same time? Like Linux SuSE and W2K? Thanks

Actually, I'm pretty sure you can install more than 27 OS's as long as your boot loader supports it. I seem to remember a commercial one that let you go upto a hundred OS's. However, you won't be able to install more than 4 BSD OS's per hard disk because they can't install on extended partitions. Sirdirge: they'll know which kernel to load because the entry in the boot loader will tell them.
Cheers,
cgkanchi