Peter Humphrey, mused, then expounded: > 2. It's much easier to install other distros if they have their > own boot partition to play in. SuSE, for instance, seems > to be unable to combine its own image with all the > existing ones, so I have to go grubbing around the disks > looking for images to make grub.conf entries. >
We do the following to boot multiple os': create a small partition on dev/sda1 that contains just /boot/grub/* in /boot/grub/menu.lst (or grub.conf): # Imaging Environment grub configuration file # Installs in to MBR of first disk, and allows # chaning to the other boot options. default 8 timeout 15 #serial --unit=1 --speed=38400 --word=8 --parity=no --stop=1 #terminal --timeout=10 --dumb serial console title disk 1 slot 1 root /dev/sda2 image likely x86_64-rhel4u4 # OS root device /dev/sda2 root (hd0,1) rootnoverify (hd0,1) chainloader +1 title disk 1 slot 2 root /dev/sda3 image likely x86_64-rhel5-ga # OS root device /dev/sda3 root (hd0,2) rootnoverify (hd0,2) chainloader +1 title disk 1 slot 3 root /dev/sda5 image likely x86_64-sles10-gmc # OS root device /dev/sda5 root (hd0,4) rootnoverify (hd0,4) chainloader (hd0,0)/boot/grub/bootsect-xfs-sda5 title disk 1 slot 4 root /dev/sda6 image likely x86_64-sles9sp3-e1000 # OS root device /dev/sda6 root (hd0,5) rootnoverify (hd0,5) chainloader (hd0,0)/boot/grub/bootsect-xfs-sda6 etc... Then install each dist in it's own partition with no individual /boot partition. The chainloader then picks up the grub entry from that partition. I do the same with WinXP on my laptop for the few times I boot into that partition. Typically, though, we only use parted to setup our partitions. And a lot of the time we set up our systems as GPT disks with labels. Bob - -- [email protected] mailing list
