On Tue, 1 Mar 2005, Neil Bothwick wrote:
On Tue, 1 Mar 2005 10:30:38 -0500 (EST), Christopher Fisk wrote:
What fun is life without a little danger :)
You are asking that of a person who makes a living at IT? I much prefer a nice boring day than a "Fix it or your fired" day.
As with the other methods proposed, you should always keep a backup of your existing boot setup.
Here is one for the archives:
#This will backup the MBR, but *NOT* the partition table dd if=/dev/hda of=mbr.bin bs=448 count=1
#This will backup the MBR + Partition tables dd if=/dev/hda of=mbr.bin bs=512 count=1
you can restore by going the other way.
Or, if you aren't sure which you'll need, just backup the whole thing
dd if=/dev/hda of=mbr.bin bs=512 count=1
And you can restore the whole thing if needed. Or, if you only need the boot loader, you can just do the first 448 of that mbr.bin
dd if=mbr.bin of=/dev/hda bs=448 count=1
Backups *ARE* run. =)
When testing distros, I prefer to keep the whole distro in one place, instead of mixing files from different distros in one partition. I have done it this way, but keeping them separate makes for easier removal. If you need to have two or more distros permanently installed, integrating them as you suggest makes more sense, although in that case, prefer to have the secondary distros in VMWare to save rebooting to get at hem.
Perhaps I'm just past the part where screwing with partitions bothers me. Experiance is key in that department.
Another advantage to this (Assuming the same version of gcc is used for each distribution) is that you can use the same kernel for every distribution.
Some distros expect you to be using their, often heavily, patched kernels and may fall over when running without some of those patches.
Bah, first thing I do is to get the latest vanilla kernel and use that.
Christopher Fisk -- BOFH Excuse #195: We only support a 28000 bps connection. -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
