>>Yupp. Multi boot practice started under W2K, as the "difficult" setup back then
>
>Under, but not in. As far as I can remember, there never were any windowses which would allow that - each one would wipe the boot sector, so any non-m$ (and m$) boots would be gone.

Uhhm - nope. You could install multibooting different versions of windows with no problem,
as long as DOS based was only first install if installed and
the order of installation time mirrored the version number of NT and following.
Looong time of of W98 on first partition, 2 or more of NT type versions on different disks or partitons.
In Vista times: XP, Vista (never used), Linux.

MBR limited the # of partitions, but with additional disks no problem.
You had to tweak the bootmanager link file, but that was it.

>It was always Linux that you had to install _after_ windowses, in order to have a multiboot, because it was doing the courtesy that windowses never did, to allow other boots on the same disk to survive its installation.

Problem with Linux was: it needed its own boot manager, back then only grub.
This one replaced the Win and had an entry to jump to windows...
Subsequent Win were a mess ;-)
>
>Now things may have changed, the last time I installed one of the windowses was when w7 was still somewhat fresh, I wouldn't know. And, frankly, I wouldn't care.

Back then I had 3 - 9 typical boot errors each year - update of SCSI or other drivers,
boot sector nulled, HD went haywire - you name it. Also more than 2 BSDs per week.
At Win7 start there were a few BSD, also few times to start with repair mode -
but nothing compared to early W2K. NT had more crashes, but did not trash the disk...

LiveLinux to repair from USB much better than DVD, so multiboot switched from
repair to test, but only seldom, as Virtualbox was much easier to handle...

now: windows is solid since 2015 - possible exception bungled update.

regards
thomas