On 2024-02-23, Mark Knecht <markkne...@gmail.com> wrote: > The only other idea I had was to install <new distro> to a different > disk and then use something like Clonezilla to move it to the partition > you want it in on your system. > > While I suspect you were being sarcastic I do not think any solution > that involves a 'pocketful of USB 3 thumb drives' will be satisfying.
Actually (assuming the thumb drives are relaible) it probably would work fine. That's more-or-less the typical solution that my colleagues use -- though it's a drawer full of hard drives in caddies instead of USB thumb drives. Back in the day when we supported a couple versions of SCO, various BSDs, Novell Netware and Solaris, it required a fait bit of drawer space. For now, I guess I'll stick with the scheme I'm using but switch from DOS disklabel and gap to GPT disklabel and BIOS boot partition. It seems ugly, but it's managable with the help of a few shell scripts that are stored in the parition that belongs to the master copy of grub.
