Bill,
The good news is most quality operating systems allow multiple boot
natively. Windows ME isn't one of them so by default it has to be installed
first. The short story is as follows.
FDisk a partition on the drive for  Windows ME. Use your best judgement as
to the size. If you don't have a lot of data or programs to run in ME, 5-10
GIG should be plenty.
I haven't used OS/2 in a long time, but I seem to remember it having a boot
manager which means it plays well in a multi-boot scheme. You might want to
double check. If you start to do the install and it wants to take over the
whole drive, you need to back out of the install. As for Linux, it comes
with a boot manager (LILO) that plays very nicely (most of the time) with
many other OSs. Linux usually likes to have 4 or 5 partitions but can be
installed on just one. W2K and XP also have boot managers and they can be
installed on a multi-boot system fairly painlessly as well. At one time I
had DOS 6.22, WIN98, W2K, XP, Linux, and Unix installed on a single drive.
It took a bit of fanagling to get DOS and Win98 on together but the rest
was pretty much point and click. If you Google multi-boot you'll find a
wealth of information on setting up multi-boot drives as well as open
source boot managers.   I would get all the OSs on and operating prior to
loading any software. That way, if the things goes Tango Uniform, you won't
have much time invested. Once the basic installs are done, do any patches
or updates, and then start with programs....preferably one OS at a time.
Usually things just work, but every once in a while something gets out of
bounds and wrecks  the party.....mostly programs that go directly to
hardware, like Partition Mgrs, defraggers, etc.

I have even been known to run multiple boots of the same OS. One as a test
platform, one as a production machine. The sky is the limit (actually drive
space is) with most boot managers. Hope this gets you pointed in the right
direction.

Good luck, and have fun.
Michael

t 05:24 PM 6/13/2004, you wrote:
>Hello:
>
>I am new to the list and am interested in installing multiple operating
>systems on one of my PCs.

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