The penta boot saga on my L-SAPO-1 laptop

A few weeks ago, I planned a project that in my mind would be simple: create a penta boot with Linux Mint on the SSD and Windows XP, Vista, 7, and 10 on the HDD. Why? I'm crazy.

First I went to buy a drive caddy so I could install the hard drive together with my SSD. Free shipping? R$ 100 (around US$ 20). Regular shipping? R$ 14 + R$ 10 for shipping (total of about US$ 5). There's no logic in capitalism, but fine, Mercado Libre, I bought it.

I purchased a 12.7 mm drive caddy, and guess what? They sent me a 9.5 mm one! I only realized this after I exploded with anger while opening the laptop: the accessory didn't fit, so I decided to open my gadget. The laptop has about 20 screws, and most of them are all stripped. I wouldn't have had to go through all this hassle if the size had been correct. To end on a sour note, the touchpad and one USB port stopped working. I hate hardware.

I called a trusted technician, he fixed it and, as a bonus, managed to properly secure the drive caddy, even though it wasn't the correct size. With this issue resolved, I proceeded to install the operating systems.

Starting with Windows XP, Rufus couldn't make the USB drive boot on the machine. YUMI couldn't either. After doing some research, I found that it's recommended to use WinSetupFromUSB to set up Windows XP installation media on USB drives. I used it, and... it worked! I proceeded with the installation as usual, but when I reached the partitioning section, I had a surprise.

For some reason, Windows XP required the boot partition to be created on the primary disk (the SSD). I noticed that the SSD had its partition table set as GPT, even though the laptop didn't support UEFI specification. I wiped the disk and converted it to MBR, but the problem persisted. I could have temporarily removed the SSD, but considering the horror I went through while opening the laptop, I dismissed the idea. It would have been easier for me to throw the device against the wall than to succeed in performing this "surgery"!

I decided to give the Windows XP installer a free pass, and it created the boot partition on the SSD. The installation continued, but after restarting, it resulted in a blue screen. Its stop code was 0xEA: THREAD_STUCK_IN_DEVICE_DRIVER and mentioned the word "framebuf". Although I know how to debug blue screens, situations like this where it's not possible to collect minidump files and other system logs are more nerve-wracking. "framebuf" refers to the video driver, but I couldn't come up with any logical solution.

I talked to some friends but we couldn't reach an agreement. They even asked if I had set the SATA mode to IDE instead of AHCI. I didn't want to make that change because it would affect the performance of the other operating systems and since I had included the necessary drivers on the installation media, that couldn't be the issue. So, I decided to abandon Windows XP from the project and change the goal to a quad boot.

One interesting detail I noticed: while the Windows XP installer was loading the necessary files, a screen briefly appeared, displaying the logo of the Windows .NET Server Family - the preliminary name for Server 2003.

I moved on to Vista. Just like its predecessor, it demanded a boot partition on the SSD. I allowed it to proceed, and the installation went smoothly. After the first boot-up, I headed to Acer's website and noticed that the company had removed the drivers for my laptop. I contacted them via email, but they gave deviant responses. Despite this mischief, I was able to locate, download, and install the necessary drivers in alternative sources.

Even after overcoming the initial hurdle, I still had issues: Legacy Update - a community project that allows searching and installing updates on operating systems where Windows Update has been discontinued - would simply not install. The error was unclear, and there were no logs to report. Because of this, I decided to exclude Vista from the project as well.

Windows 7 and Windows 10 installed smoothly and just like the others they required the boot partition on the SSD. I didn't oppose it, and the installation went fine, with the bootloader being configured to list and boot both systems automatically. I proceeded to install Linux Mint Debian Edition on the SSD, but I forgot to manually configure the partitioning so that it wouldn't erase the Windows boot partition. As a result, after the first reboot, only Linux Mint was bootable.

I thought to myself: "simple, I just need to recreate the boot partition". Big mistake, Rio. None of my attempts worked to get both systems to boot. I recreated partitions, followed various articles, asked friends for help, and ran automatic repairs of the Windows recovery media, but nothing worked.

At one point, I came across this comment on Reddit. This short tutorial teaches how to install Windows 10 directly through the Command Prompt in the best Arch Linux style ¹, deploying the system image with DISM and allowing both system partitions to be located wherever you please. I wasn't very optimistic, but I decided to give it a try. And wouldn't you know it? It worked!

I went to repeat the procedure with Windows 7, but I discovered another obstacle: its DISM is not as comprehensive as Windows 10's, and from what I researched, it isn't very good to use a different version's DISM to deploy Windows 7 system images.

Upon further research, I found that I needed to use the ImageX tool, which is not included with Windows 7. To use it, I had to download the Windows Automated Installation Kit for Windows 7. Following this guide, I created a Windows PE media and copied the "install.wim" file to the USB drive. From here, I deployed the image and configured the boot partition.

Both systems were installed correctly and Linux Mint was able to detect them during installation. With everything working, I decided to also install Windows 8.1 and replace the current Windows 10 with Windows 10 Enterprise 2015 LTSB to have a contrast with the first version of Codename Threshold. As usual, resizing partitions in GParted caused file corruption in the Windows 8.1 partition, so I had to reinstall it.

Weeks passed and I wiped everything. I wasn't using all these systems and Debian Xfce worked better for me.

¹ - a few days later and Chris Titus posted a video showing exactly the same as I did.