What is Multibooting?

Multibooting is the ability to install and use more than one Operating System in the same computer.

Generally most of us use just one operating system in our computers such as Windows or Linux. But there are people who install and use more than one operating systems in their computers. Some of the people who do this are:

• Computer students
• Computer teachers
• Programmers and developers who would like to test, how their application will behave in different operating systems
• Testers

Such users who have installed more than one operating systems in their computers will see a menu with a list of operating systems that they have installed. They can choose the operating system with which they want to boot from the list. Likewise they have switch between different OS by rebooting and selecting the OS. This is called multibooting.

How to install more than one Operating Systems in one computer?

1. Disk Partitioning

If your computer has two hard disks and they are not partitioned then you can two different Operating Systems on each of this hard disks. If you have only one hard disk and it is partitioned then you can install different OS on each of these partitions. Each OS needs to have a separate partition.

You can use FDISK to partition the harddisk in windows. This is not an easy tool to use. While partitioning, the data in the harddisk will be lost. Therefore you need to backup the data before partitioning.

If you are not so sure about using this command, there are other more user friendly applications available for partitioning. 'Nortan Partition Magic' is one such tool. You can get this tool, This is not a free tool. 'Ranish partition manager' is a free tool but it is a bit difficult to use.

If you like to use windows and linux in your computer, then install Windows first and partition your hard disk and then install Linux in the other partition.

2. Virtual Machine (VM)

Those who want to use multiple OS in their computers can use Virtual Machines. VM is now very popular. By the use of software, VM creates a Virtual environment for different OS. You have installed many applications in your computer. VM is another application. To switch between one OS to another, run the VM application first and then switch to the other OS. Then the VM will generate a virtual environment for the other OS. The other OS will then think that it is using the computer entirely by itself.

Using the Multibooting method only one OS can be run at a time. The selection is done while booting.

Using VM, more than one OS can run simultaneously. Each OS will run without knowing the existence of the other OS. But this will reduce the computer speed and performance. Some of the popular VM are Microsoft Virtual PC (www.microsoft.com) and VMware Workstation (www.vmware.com)

3. Emulators

Sometimes you may not need the full fledged OS. But you may want to use a specific feature of an OS. For instance you may not want the full 'Linux' OS but you want the base shell of Linux to run linux based applications on your computer.

In Windows, you may want to see the look and feel of 'Linux' and you want to run 'Linux' commands on the windows OS. For this there are emulators available for different OS.

For example, you can use Cygwin which is a free tool to emulate the Unix OS under windows. You can download this tool from (www.cygwin.com).

Source: - http://www.allpctips.com/software/whatis-multibooting.htm