Well I was going to have a quad-boot Mac, but the download of Ubuntu that took hours ended up being corrupted. I was not about to wait hours again for it to download, so I thought about it for a quick second and decided I didn't need Ubuntu in addition to Windows XP and Windows 7.
Basically, here's what I did. I already had a license of Windows XP from when I previously Boot Camped it. I then bought a license of Windows 7 from my bookstore, which turned out to be an upgrade. Oh well, it worked out in the end.
First, I removed my Boot Camp partition that held XP and resized the Mac partition to full size. I backed up my computer using Time Machine to my external hard drive. Then, I rebooted into my Snow Leopard disk. I used Disk Utility to create the following partition format:
- Windows 7: 50 GB
- Storage: 50 GB
- Windows XP: 50 GB
- Mac OS X: …whatever the remaining size was.
Then, I installed Snow Leopard fresh on my Mac OS X partition. I decided not to restore my data until I installed the Windows installations working, just in case I screwed up and had to reformat the drives. I then installed rEFIt which is a shiny boot menu that would make booting into the various operating systems I had installed easy.
Next, I rebooted into my XP CD and installed it on my Windows 7 partition. After installation, I popped in the Windows 7 disk and upgraded. Yes, XP to 7 upgrading works. However, you have to wipe your old installation, and your files with it. Then the old data goes into a "Windows.old" folder on your new installation of 7. I didn't have any data worth anything, so this didn't matter to me. Moving on!
I got Windows 7 installed. Then, I validated it. Then, I used my Snow Leopard disk to install all the drivers that make the shiny Mac stuff work with Windows. Once that was done, Windows XP time again! So I installed XP again, this time on the XP partition. Did that, validated, and installed drivers.
THEN it was time to restore my data as now I had two working Windows installations. I used the Time Machine restore function. It restored my applications, and that was basically it. I was pretty pissed until I realized that for some reason Time Machine had simply restricted permissions on my Documents, Music, Pictures and some of the application data folders that included things like my Thunderbird mail and my The Hit List data. So, after swearing at Time Machine multiple times for scaring me so badly and entering my magical admin password about 100 times, I had all my data back.
So, that's that and I have three operating systems. I also bought a single-use student copy of Microsoft Office 2007 which I installed on XP. It's what we use here at the college, and its Mac equivalent, 2008, is SO much different.
Oh and the purpose for the storage partition is that it can be written to from all partitions, so I can easily share data amongst my operating systems without having to use my external hard drive or flash drive. Speaking of which, I think I lost the flash drive that I just bought. D'oh!
And, if you hadn't noticed, I have failed miserably at NaBloPoMo. I even attempted to try NaNoWriMo, but my plot idea failed and I gave up. 
