Multiple OSes

Hello,

Bought a 250G PiDrive with 6x6 enclosure for my Pi3 and must say that the enclosure was quite cumbersome and wish the design catered more for the peripherals. But managed to get it up and running but had a questions concerning the project partitions

Are these partitions used to install the Oses on? or are they for something else entirely? I want to install multiple Oses as I go along but not keen on how the NOOB boot loader/ install has to erase the data overtime i need to install additional oses.

is there any tuts on how to use the partitions?

There is a problem with the box, usb connectors are inside and prevent insertion of usb stick. Also power cable connector is too short. Have to take off lid and unsrew pi to do any hardware related work, which you dont have to on an ordinary pi case. Suggest redesign of case pushing pi usbs and ethernet outside though slots and extending power cable to a external socket or at least outside of box, so you dont have to take lid off. Also on view of new pi3 b+ may have to consider a fan hole in case.

NOOBS is an out-of-box software, meaning that it is only meant to be run once for a one-time setup. It’s not intended to be run multiple times.

However, you can add multiple partitions and operating systems by using tools within your existing OS. For instance, in Raspbian, you could use parted (or install gparted) to resized and add more partitions. You can then install other operating systems to those partitions.

Where is gets tricky is handling the bootloader. The RPi doesn’t work with traditional bootloaders such as GRUB. So you’ll need to make some manual adjustments to the bootloader provided by NOOBS to make it work. It can’t be done from within the NOOBS software, but it is possible by adding the information about the new operating system to the NOOBS config files in the SETTINGS partition. This is a bit advanced, but it’s not extremely difficult. I plan on writing a tutorial for this in the future and will post back here if I do.