QUAD Booting(98, XP, Vista, Ubunto)

wORSHEEt 3

         Since windows can only see 4 primary partitions, i gave the 2nd,3rd,and 4th partition to windows: (the first partition is reserved for EFI) the 2nd one for vista, the 4th one for xp,and the 3rd one is a FAT which can be accessed by all four OSes.The 5th partition for windows 98. And i need another HFS+ partition to be able to reinstall Tiger or upgrade to Leopard just from the dmg file, this is the 6th partition. The 7th partition: for ubuntu linux. The 8th partition: linux swap. The difficulty here, lies in installing XP. Somehow in this partition scheme, xp can only be installed on the "last" partition, (as windows don't even know there are a fifth partition, the "last" is the 4th) but when installing into the 4th partition it also installs its boot code to the 2nd partition thus ruins vista boot if vista has been installed on the 2nd partition. If installing vista after xp has been installed, vista takes control of the xp boot thus i have to make a second choice after selecting from rEFIt boot menu. So it seems the only way to convince xp to install boot code to the 4th partition and vista to not take control of xp booting is to have only one windows partition while installing xp, then make a partition image of xp, then repartition and install other OSes, then restore xp image. Fortunately you only have to do this once, after the four OSes have been installed, reinstalling any OS is simple, just do it, it will not affect any other OSes. I will explain why at the end of this post. Now the detailed steps i took to do a quad boot:

0.Prepare your Boot Camp driver CD. Backup your files.
1.Prepare your XP winclone image:
1.1 Boot from your Tiger install DVD, from the Utilities manu, choose Disk Utility. Under Volume Scheme, choose 3 partitions. Click the last partition, specify its format as "MS-DOS File System". Make sure the other two partitions are "Mac OS Extended(Journaled)", Click Partition. (Now all your data are destroyed)
1.2 Close Disk Utility. Install WINDOWS 98 to the first partition. Do a minimal install for you are about to discard it.
1.3 After reboot into WINDOWS 98, download and install winclone from www.twocanoes.com
1.4 Insert XP install CD, reboot while holding the Option key. Choose to boot from CD. Install XP into the last partition.(marked C: ) You must format the partition as NTFS. (winclone cannot clone a FAT partition) Remember to hold the option key when reboot and boot from the Windows disk to continue install. After done, i gave the XP partition a volume name "XP".
1.5 Now you have a clean install of XP, no need to install the hardware driver at this point, just reboot into WINDOWS 98, make a winclone image of your XP partition. Save the image on an external hard disk.
2.Reboot from your Tiger install DVD, run Disk Utility. This time choose 6 partitions. Partition as below:
0 EFI protected (which is invisible under Disk Utility)
1 Name:Vista Format: MS-DOS File System
2 Name:FAT Format: MS-DOS File System
3 Name:XP Format: MS-DOS File System
4 Name:WINDOWS98 Format: Mac OS Extended(Journaled)
5 Name:HFS Format: Mac OS Extended(Journaled)
6 Format: Free Space
3.Install Tiger onto volume "WINDOWS98". After reboot into WINDOWS 98, download rEFIt from refit.sourceforge.net ,install it to volume "WINDOWS9". Now you have a boot manager. Insert Vista install DVD and reboot from it.
4.Install Vista onto partition 2 named "Vista".(That is the first volume you can see under Tiger's Disk Utility) You must format it as NTFS at this point. Vista will install with no problems. (It will reboot several times) After done, i gave the vista partition a volume name "VISTA".
5.(Optional) Now you have a clean install of Vista, reboot into WINDOWS 98, make a winclone image of your Vista partition for future use. Reboot into Vista and let Vista check the disk.(Do it now, don't give XP the chance to check the Vista partition or Vista can be hurt.)
6.Restore your XP winclone image to the volume "XP" (/dev/disk0s4). Reboot into XP and let XP check the disk.
7.Now reboot to Vista. If Vista fails to boot, use Vista DVD to repair it. You may need a USB keyboard to do this. (I don't know why but sometimes restoring XP's winclone image makes Vista unable to boot, fortunately vista DVD quickly repairs it) 
8.Insert ubuntu install live CD,(i use ubuntu 7.04 64bit) reboot from it. Launch install from desktop. 
At step 3, choose your keyboard layout as Macintosh.
At step 4, choose to manually partition the disk:
create a / partition and a swap partition at the end of the disk.(Swap must be larger than memory to be able to "hibernate". And one megabyte here is 1000*1000 bytes, not 1024*1024)
(Optional) You may notice there is a 134M free space(in fact 128M, 134=128*1.024*1.024) between /dev/sda5 and /dev/sda6, believe me, it's of no use. I create a 9th partition here for /boot to reclaim the space.
At step 7, before you go ahead with the install, click "advanced", and tell ubuntu to install GRUB to (hd0,2), the FAT partition. (Yes, this is the right place. Installing GRUB into the MBR will let GRUB manage the windows booting, you will have to go through 2 boot manager to boot windows or linux, which is not what we want. Besides MBR, it seems GRUB can only be installed into among the first 4 partitions to be bootable, and the FAT partition right now doesn't contain a boot code so it's safe to have GRUB live there)
Proceed with the install. Reboot and you will see 4 OSes from rEFIt menu.
9.Install boot camp drivers under xp and vista. Google and find ways to make airport and wireless mighty mouse work under ubuntu. Google and find ways to fix the screen resolution under ubuntu. Google and find ways to enable touchpad scrolling/tapping/right-clicking under ubuntu.
10.Done! Enjoy your quad booting monster.
Now XP and Vista can see 3 windows partitions, WINDOWS 98 can see 2 NTFS,1 FAT, and 2 HFS+ partitions. Linux can see all.