mbr is the master boot record. Its a small amount of space on an hd reserved for boot information. Every time you choose "install grub/lilo to MBR, you are completely rewriting, not appending to it.
On Oct 20, 2009 7:17 AM, "Greg M. Johnson" <[email protected]> wrote: Joe Apuzzo wrote: > Just to add one thing and answer one part, Fedora and > Ubuntu ( aka Debian and children ) must format /boot to > install correctly ( I think this is a mistake but what I > have found ) so when installing leave "/boot" under "/" > and used the change loader like suggested. Since this > will allow for /boot to be formatted when "/" is. Thanks for the advice all. I think Joe's point above is ultimately why my setup failed. I guess it also explains why I remember getting warnings that I should have formatted /boot. ;-p Does "MBR" mean "/boot" in yall's advice here? And you're saying that I should indeed make an extra little, primary partition, just don't call it /boot for each install, right? The idea of separate /homes is an interesting one. I believe Fedora gave me a warning that it would have liked to clean out the existing /home if I were to reuse the same userid across distros. That might be a tolerable situation, making gregf, gregs, gregk userids for separate logins. I also vaguely remember from prior play with ubuntu that it came up with its own grubbish boot-up screen that automatically knew about various distros on my partitions. So I'll look for these boot managers, but I'll see what a correct install looks like. <rant> I must say about this experience that in many ways, this must be the golden age of linux. Four years ago, there were all kinds of driver problems. That led an opinionated noob like myself to seek out whatever distro were willing to ship with all of them, and *those* turned out to be some pretty poor choices for other reasons. I would say that the advice of "just carry your box over to your ethernet cable and recompile the kernel", which was suggested in a Debian IRC, was an untenable suggestion for noobs, not a good way to achieve market penetration. But today none of the major distros (not simply Mint) give me a problem with wifi. They might pass the "grandmother" test. </rant> -- Greg M. Johnson http://pterandon.blogspot.com _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium Oct 7 - Glade - Linux GUIs made easy Nov 4 - Google Wave Dec 2 - MythTV Jan 6 - Git _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium Oct 7 - Glade - Linux GUIs made easy Nov 4 - Google Wave Dec 2 - MythTV Jan 6 - Git
