Testing different OS's with multiboot and Windows Home Server

"If I understand your question right, you have a WHS machine online and working, and you want to test its recovery functions by configuring a workstation machine as multiboot into varying OS's. If I'm not understanding that right, sorry, the rest of this won't make sense.

What you want should be doable. You will run into MBR issues on the test machine, so plan your bare-OS installations in an order that takes care of these issues. I think one potential troublespot would be installing both 32- and 64-bit versions of Win7 to the same system, but I haven't played with it so another user will need to jump in with advice. Fedora should play nice with any of these.

As far as ""better solutions"" go, you really don't give enough detail on what you're trying to accomplish. If it's just a network storage & backup solution you're after, a Linux/SAMBA server can provide the network storage, and you can find backup software (eg BackupPC) to provide the backup backend. You might want to open another question to ask that specifically.

Now to the multiboot setup.

If this test machine is used for other purposes I recommend installing your test OS images onto a separate harddrive -- that way you can disconnect your existing OS drive and not worry about destroying its MBR or existing data.

Start by creating your partitions on the multiboot drive (via linux LiveCD or existing OS). Don't worry about formatting; all of these OS's will do that for you during installation.

Here's your install order:

WinXP, since it will install and then cheerfully overwrite the MBR
Win7-32, since its bootloader will handle XP
Win7-64, make sure it gets a separate partition
Fedora, since it will detect the others

In terms of conflicts between XP/Win7-32/Win7-64, I haven't tried it, so another user will have to give you tips there. I expect they won't be a problem if you're installing to separate partitions."