newbie  

Re: [newbie] Dual Booting with Multiple Linux Distros (Mandi, Debian)

Mikkel L. Ellertson
Sun, 10 Apr 2005 12:59:14 -0700

Philippe Landau wrote: 
Philippe Landau wrote:

if i install Mandi, what options should i choose
to preserve the current grub entries ?
or to copy them over to lilo (whatever mandrake 10.1 uses).
last time i tried my superblock and its 7 backups were destroyed.
(i have no idea what that is.)


now that i installed mandrake 10.1,
how do i modify the mbr to be able to boot into
the other linux installations ?
control center:boot:boot loader says i need to
specify a kernel image, but does not show the ones
waiting on different partitions.

kind regards     philippe

There a several ways to do it. One way it to have each distribution install its boot loader to its root partition, instead of the MBR, and then use one boot loader to give you a menu of distributions. This boot loader just loads the distribution's boot loader, and lets it take it from there. You can use LILO, Grub, or another boot loader of your own choice for this. You would use the same format as you do for booting Windows from the boot loader.

For lilo, it would be something like:

other=/dev/hda1
  label="windows"

other=/dev/hda5
  label="mandrake"

other=/dev/hda7
  label="debian"

You can usualy specify where you want the boot loader installed as part of the install. If you want to do it later, you have to edit the config file. For lilo, edit /etc/lilo.conf and change "boot=/dev/hda" to "boot=/dev/hda5" if you want lilo to install to partition 5. Then run "lilo" to do the install.

The advantage of doing it this way is that when you upgrade a kernel, the kernel install scripts will update the boot loader for you. Otherwise you have to keep track of the kernel changes for each distribution in the distribution that the boot loader is installed in.

The disadvantage is that you are using 2 boot loaders to boot your Linux distribution.

Another way is to have one /boot partition that has the kernels for each distribution. Each distribution mounts it, and the boot loader knows where to find each kernel/inital RAM disk. But it can be fun keeping the names steight.

A third way is to mount each /boot or / partition, and give the full path to the kernel for each distribution, based on the mount point. In other words, if you mounted the Debian root directory on /debian, then the kernel would be /debian/boot/<debial kernel>.

Mikkel
--

  Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons,
for you are crunchy and taste good with Ketchup!

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