List operating systems installed on machine

Question

I would like to list all operating systems installed on some machine. This machine may have a lot of OS's (windows, linux distributions, esxi). I have physical access to this computer and I have a privileged account (admin). How do I list all those OS's?

Answer 1

if you have a lot of OSs on your machine and one of this is linux it means that you can read lilo or grub configs in order to list os's on this machine.

Answer 2

While it is difficult to tell the exact OS installed, what you can do is use a partition tool tool like MiniPartition Wizard for windows or gparted for linux to list the partitions. Each partition has a flag that tells what filesystem it is useing and usually there is a one-to-one corresponce between filesystem and OS, but not always as some OS can use different filesystems like linux can be installed on NTFS, but for the most part it will give you a good idea. For example NTFS/FAT usually is windows, ext2/3/4 is linux, ect...

Answer 3

os-prober is an OS detection tool available in at least some Linux distributions and used mainly to add other operating systems to the grub menu.

On my Debian system it works like this:

$ sudo os-prober               
/dev/sda1:Windows Recovery Environment (loader):Windows:chain
/dev/sda2:Windows 7 (loader):Windows1:chain

As can be seen, it does not display the OS that it is run from, only other available operating systems.