Hello

PJR (<pjr@NOSPAMkookbusters.org>) wrote:

> On Wed, 12 Oct 2005 16:30:38 +0100, Chris <nospam@[127.0.0.1]> wrote
> in alt.os.linux.debian:
>
>> Successfully installing Sarge has made me unwarrantedly confident
>> about experimenting - particularly with the support of people in this
>> newsgroup.
>>
>> Luckily I have a spare machine, which has an 80GB drive.
>> I'm wondering about putting several OSs on it like this:
>>
>> Partition 1 XP
>> Partition 2 Vista
>> Partition 3 FAT32 writeable by all OSs for data
>> Partition 4 Debian Sarge
>> Partition 5 SUSE 10.0
>> Partition 6 Linux Swap
>>
>> Does that sound sensible?
>
> it certainly sounds possible.
>
> I would suggest putting the swap partition near the middle of the disk
> to gain a slight speed advantage. You could also consider creating a
> /home partition to be shared by Debian and SuSE for convenience.
>
>> And how would the multi-booting best be done?
>> BootMagic on the MBR?
>>
>> Or would the successive installs simply add items to a GRUB on the
>> MBR?
>
> Grub reads either /boot/grub/menu.lst or /boot/grub/grub.conf in order
> to list the available kernels.

Right. You can also install a "master" system (e.g. Debian), have it add
the Debian kernels and additionally entries for the other partitions,
e.g.:

title Windows XP
root (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

title SuSE
root (hd0,2)
chainloader +1

Using the chainloader option, the other systems like SuSE can install
their own bootloaders into their own partitions. That way each
distribution can maintain it's own bootloader with it's own kernels,
and only one system needs to know about all the partitions (but doesn't
need to know about the other systems' kernels, or what kind of other
systems are installed). You could for example replace the system in
hd0,2 by some other distribution and have the new distribution install
it's own bootloader to hd0,2 during installation without chaning
anything in the configuration of the master bootloader, which could be
installed in the MBR.

> Debian updates this automatically when a new kernel is installed, but
> in my experience doesn't handle the update quite as I'd like it to. My
> solution is to update the Grub configuration manually after each
> kernel upgrade. This isn't particularly difficult.

If your problem is that update-grub ignores boot parameters you had set
for your kernels, open the menu.lst and take a look at the line that
starts with #kopt=
You can add your own options there (e.g. vga modes or ide-scsi options),
and update-grub will add them automatically to the kernels it finds. If
you add kernels at the bottom of the menu.lst outside of the
automatically generated part, your entries will be copied to the new
menu.lst by update-grub without any changes.

best regards
Andreas Janssen

--
Andreas Janssen <andreas.janssen@bigfoot.com>
PGP-Key-ID: 0xDC801674 ICQ #17079270
Registered Linux User #267976
http://www.andreas-janssen.de/debian-tipps-sarge.html