My incredibly strange operating system arrangement.

[Ampera]

Now before I get onto what happened, I want to ask, what is the most stupid, and convoluted operating system setup you have ever used. What I mean by this are things like multi-booting, alternate or bodged bootloaders, etc.

So whenever something significant happens to my computer I like to post it here for anybody who gives a damn.

I originally had a single operating system on a single disk (I had other drives, just not for OS related stuff). This was Windows 7. Windows 7 was pretty good, but it has the old Vista issue of being a bloated mess (Windows is a bloated mess anyways, but 7 is worse). I have access to some Windows Server 2016 licenses as part of my education (Yes it's Microsoft Imagine) and I wanted to try out using Windows Server 2016 on my machine.

I have done dual booting many many times on my machines. With Linux it was done elegantly, and even on Windows it has gone off without issue, but not this time.

To start off with I had no flash drives, and Windows Server 2016 does not fit onto a DVD (Yes I still use those). So my bright idea was to take an old 300GB SATA hard drive and throw the installer image onto there and use that. Advantages being hard drives are faster than USB flash drives and optical media in most cases. So that all went well, and I am now in the setup. I think I even had done all the partitioning beforehand with GParted because the last decent partition editor Microsoft ever made was fdisk. When I went to install it, it refused to play nicely with Windows 7 and insisted on either removing everything from the drive, or just throwing itself on a partition. I chose the latter.

Long story short what ended up happening was Windows 7's bootloader refused to boot Server 2016, and Server 2016 didn't install with one because of the aforementioned chickenshit installer. Lucky me, the bootloader on the install media was happy to boot into both operating systems with 0 issue. And for the longest time that's what I had configured. I loved, and still love Server 2016, IMO it's the closest modern operating experience one can get to Windows 2000 which was the last decent thing Microsoft ever made (Decent in that it didn't make suicide seem like a good idea).

Today I decided to get rid of Windows 7 as it had gone completely unused, and I had removed so much data off that partition it probably wouldn't have booted anymore anyways. So to easily get rid of it, I copied everything I still wanted off that parition, hopped into GParted, formated, deleted, moved the new partition to the left, and expanded. This is where shit went down. Remember that bootloader on the other drive? It refused to re-configure itself after I moved the partition to the left. No sweat, I thought, I'll just hop into the install disk's command prompt and rebuild the bootloader, get all that going again.

Well that didn't work. It didn't recognize any copy of windows being present on that partition, and because there wasn't really and system reserved partition, or even a boot folder in the OS, it refused to do anything, at that moment I threw my hands up in annoyance, and decided to just reinstall windows. I still wanted all the files on that partition, so I hopped into the Windows PE version of Macrium Reflect (Which was all I had) and made an image of that partition onto my backup disk (Deleting the old and outdated backup I had that I wouldn't want to restore from anyways)

Great, that's backed up, new version of Windows in (And at this point I had turned the drive from MBR to GPT, which was part of the original confusion) and, oh, Windows Server 2016 can't open Macrium Reflect images for free straight up, and like hell am i spending whatever the server version of Macrium Reflect costs for like 10 cents worth of crap I could probably get back anyways.

My solution here is to use a VM, Split my backup drive into two partitions, mount the image in Windows PE, copy all the files over, and be on my merry way. And that's what I'm doing now.

Sorry for the amazingly long block of text here. You don't really have to care or even read this, it's more something for me to do while this all goes on.

But tl;dr I now have a booting GPT version of Windows Server 2016 that does not need another drive to boot into it, and has the full 500 GB access to my SSD. To boot I  have all my files still.

[rdl]

I  put an Icy Dock in my computer last year. I also bought a bunch of cheap Kingston SSDs. I no longer have to deal with multi-booting. To switch operating systems or environments, I just reboot with a different drive plugged in. Data is mostly stored elsewhere, though there are some games on the Windows 7/Steam drive.

[alexanderbrevig]

The computer I regularly use with the weirdest operating system arrangement is a mac book with only OS X installed. Who the f*ck tolerates that shit!? 

[Vtile]

Windows server 2003 (IIRC) running original CP/M system as a main and only operation in laptop and it were a big name branded unit.

[Ian.M]

Heh.  Back in the Win9x days I had some pretty hairy multi-boot setups involving Grub4DOS, and keeping the Linux kernal on a FAT32 filesystem so Grub4DOS could see it.   The worst was a system that needed a software overlay for LBA support due to BIOS limitations.  As the LBA overlay was installed in the MBR, it was incredibly fragile, and booting from floppy for maintenance was a multi-disk shuffle . . . . .

Then there was the Win95 OSR2B system with a 68EC040 QXL card that had to drop to DOS mode (or boot into it to save time) to run the DOS I/O application for the SMSQ/E OS that ran on the QXL card.   I also had a CP/M emulator that ran under SMSQ/E . . . . .

[GreyWoolfe]

Just to mention, Server 2016 does fit on a DVD but it must be a dual layer DVD.  I have a volume license copy myself thanks to my company paying for a MSDN subscription for a small project my boss handed me.  I am going to install it on a hard drive and see how it plays with the little that i will be doing on that computer.

[Ampera]

Heh.  Back in the Win9x days I had some pretty hairy multi-boot setups involving Grub4DOS, and keeping the Linux kernal on a FAT32 filesystem so Grub4DOS could see it.   The worst was a system that needed a software overlay for LBA support due to BIOS limitations.  As the LBA overlay was installed in the MBR, it was incredibly fragile, and booting from floppy for maintenance was a multi-disk shuffle . . . . .

Then there was the Win95 OSR2B system with a 68EC040 QXL card that had to drop to DOS mode (or boot into it to save time) to run the DOS I/O application for the SMSQ/E OS that ran on the QXL card.   I also had a CP/M emulator that ran under SMSQ/E . . . . .

As a collector of old machines I am aware. I don't have a 286 or 386 machine, and my 486 has LBA support up to 8GB (More than DOS even needs), but through looking at older machines on the internet, I have seen the shit that people had to go through.

Unfortunately it's not any less complicated today, but instead of limitations complicating the matter, it's now just a whole, load, of files, doing one thing or the other.

Just to mention, Server 2016 does fit on a DVD but it must be a dual layer DVD.  I have a volume license copy myself thanks to my company paying for a MSDN subscription for a small project my boss handed me.  I am going to install it on a hard drive and see how it plays with the little that i will be doing on that computer.

Yeah, I don't have any of those, and they never made then re-writable, so I am never going to have any.

[Red Squirrel]

My current arrangement is kinda awkward, and I kind of want to change it.

I have a 3 monitor setup, problem is, it seems no OS can handle that properly.  I want the centre monitor to be the primary, and I want the side ones to be auxiliary, where I can move stuff to them, but most of the work is on the 2nd, which is centre.  It seems whether you're running Windows or Linux, some programs decide they want to open on a monitor other than the one you are currently working on.  That drives me completely up the wall.  There is actually a sense of anxiety when I go to launch something and don't know where it will end up because it's a guessing game every time.   It's a program per program basis too - it should not be, it should be simple, any dialog or window or menu should always appear on the same monitor it was launched from, no matter what, but it seems no OS maker has figured that out yet. Every program does it's own thing.  Code::blocks for example has certain dialogs that constantly open on the 1st monitor no matter what.

And this is where the weird setup starts, I got really frustrated with the whole thing of dialogs flying all over the place instead of the monitor I'm working on, and went back to single monitor for my main computer, and the two side monitors are hooked up to their own Raspberry PI which has a basic desktop environment on it. I then use Synergy so the mouse and keyboard can work on all 3.  I get the benefit of a multi monitor setup without the annoyance of dialogs and windows going on the wrong one. I obviously can't drag stuff around because it's 3 separate computers, but it does allow me to have a browser, terminal sessions and that kind of stuff going on.   

Now on it's own, this is actually quite usable. The issue is that Synergy crashes all the time and it's not just a regular crash it actually gets hung up and I need to do kill -9.  So I can't even easily write a script to automate restarting it as there is no way to really detect that it died.  So I spend more time resetting the damn thing than actually using it.  Lately I've been mostly just using the centre monitor and have a few monitoring things on one and a terminal session on other, but if I move back and forth too much then the program just crashes. Worse is if I try to copy and paste something, all hell breaks loose.

One project I want to do at some point when I'm better with electronics is come up with a hardware solution to Synergy.  It would work sorta like a KVM, but it would emulate a keyboard/mouse on each machine and translate the mouse/keyboard data to whatever one is set as active, that would ensure an instant switch over.  Don't even have to process the monitors as they would plug physically into each machine.  It would have a button to switch but also software that actually detects where the mouse is so it can do it automatically.  The benefit of doing it in hardware is that it would even work at the bios level.

[BradC]

My current arrangement is kinda awkward, and I kind of want to change it.

I have a 3 monitor setup, problem is, it seems no OS can handle that properly.  I want the centre monitor to be the primary, and I want the side ones to be auxiliary, where I can move stuff to them, but most of the work is on the 2nd, which is centre.  It seems whether you're running Windows or Linux, some programs decide they want to open on a monitor other than the one you are currently working on.

Replace your window manager with XMonad. I have 3 screens (2x27" & 1x24") and 9 virtual workspaces. Everything goes where I want it *every time* and I can arbitrarily shuffle things around. When I have to run Windows, I do it on another machine remotely and use Spice-Gtk as a viewer. This gives me dual head windows on workspaces 8&9 and I can put them where I like. Once you've tried a tiling window manager you'll either never go back, or puke and retreat. I never went back.

I use Mate as the GUI with XMonad as the manager.

BTW, OSX handles 3 heads pretty nicely too but I prefer Linux/XMonad. Windows just makes me homicidal.

[Red Squirrel]

My current arrangement is kinda awkward, and I kind of want to change it.

I have a 3 monitor setup, problem is, it seems no OS can handle that properly.  I want the centre monitor to be the primary, and I want the side ones to be auxiliary, where I can move stuff to them, but most of the work is on the 2nd, which is centre.  It seems whether you're running Windows or Linux, some programs decide they want to open on a monitor other than the one you are currently working on.

Replace your window manager with XMonad. I have 3 screens (2x27" & 1x24") and 9 virtual workspaces. Everything goes where I want it *every time* and I can arbitrarily shuffle things around. When I have to run Windows, I do it on another machine remotely and use Spice-Gtk as a viewer. This gives me dual head windows on workspaces 8&9 and I can put them where I like. Once you've tried a tiling window manager you'll either never go back, or puke and retreat. I never went back.

I use Mate as the GUI with XMonad as the manager.

BTW, OSX handles 3 heads pretty nicely too but I prefer Linux/XMonad. Windows just makes me homicidal.

Hmm I may have to experiment with that. Can you have it so the primary monitor is floating and all the others are tiling?  To me that would be the ideal setup. not sure if I'd want to do tiling for primary as some applications do launch dialogs and I don't want that to create a new tile as it will just be kinda awkward.  (like the "open" dialog etc)

I have another issue with this machine in that it does not like having a video card (tried many), the boot up sequence acts all funny and requires a lot of fighting to get it going, so I pulled it out, but that may just be an excuse to build a new machine.