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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?
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?
--
Chris

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. 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. I keep all my Linux kernels (currently Debian,
Gentoo and Slackware) in a single /boot partition, but this may not be
necessary.

I know nothing about BootMagic. Grub has worked perfectly well for me
when multibooting assorted Linuxes, BSDs and Windows versions.

PJR :-)
--
alt.usenet.kooks award-winners and FAQ:
<http://www.insurgent.org/~kook-faq/>

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

On Wed, 12 Oct 2005 18:25:37 +0200, Andreas Janssen
<andreas.janssen@bigfoot.com> wrote in alt.os.linux.debian:

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

<...>

>> 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.

That looks like a much simpler solution than mine. The only reason for
me not to adopt it myself is that I prefer not to automount /boot, and
it's easier for me to keep track of where one /boot partition is than
two or three.

>> 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=

I know about #kopt, thanks.

> 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.

The only slight inconvenience I've experienced in the past was that
the entry for the Slackware kernel entry was duplicated and the new
entry was renamed. However, my menu.lst now looks correct, so perhaps
that was a bug that's been resolved or, more likely, a mistake of mine.


PJR :-)
--
alt.usenet.kooks award-winners and FAQ:
<http://www.insurgent.org/~kook-faq/>

Chris wrote:
> 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?
> 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?

I would first physically reformat the HD, e.g. with the
appropriate utility on the CD that came with the HD. Then I
would install Windows XP which may make two partitions, a
small one in FAT format (e.g. 50 MB) and a big one in NTFS
format for the rest of the disk. Then I would shrink the
big Windows partition, e.g. to 20 or 30 GB size, and carve
up the freed up 50-60 GB into one swap partition of about
500 MB and into at least half a dozen other partitions of
various sizes, e.g. a 20-40 GB common /home partition, then
the FAT partition you wanted, and a number of / partitions
for the various Linux OS's that you want to install. Plan
with a view toward the future; you may want to install more
than just Debian and SuSE. I'd recommend you set up about
10 partitions; that would include four primary ones of which
one can then be used as a logical partition that can
encompass all the other non-primary partitions.

You can do all of the above with the Linux command fdisk or
preferably with QtParted from the live System Rescue CD-x86,
or possibly with the partition manager of the Debian installer.

After partitioning the disk in such a way, I would then
install Debian in its own / partition (perhaps 3-5 GB in
size), the /home partition and the swap partition, and I
would instruct it to install GRUB in the MBR of the HD.
This GRUB then will handle all the booting into all of the
OS's, i.e. Windows and the various Linux OS's. Each
additional Linux OS I would then install in its own /
partition (of 2-4 GB) and the common /home and swap
partitions and instruct it to install its own boot loader
(GRUB or LILO) either on a floppy or in its / directory BUT
NOT on the MBR. All the new entries in the partition table
will be recognized and handled through the GRUB installed by
Debian.

Coexistence of Windows and multiple Linuxes (or even just
one) on one and the same HD is sometimes problematic. If
you really want to be safe, you'd get yourself another
internal HD (you can probably get a 40 GB HD for $30,
assuming you have space in your system unit) and install
Windows on that HD (hda) and all the Linuxes on the 80 GB
drive (hdb).

I once read a post from someone who I believe had more than
30 different Linux OS's on his system, and he summarized the
experience gained from doing that in a recommendation for a
kind of grand strategy of disk partitioning for multibooting
machines. I thought that paper was useful, and I'll see if
I can dig it up; I have to search for it a little.

You might also come up with useful tips by googling for
"multibooting Linux Windows disk partitioning", or something
like that, in Google/Web or Google/Groups.

Robert

Here is the article on multiboot disk partitioning that I
referred to in the preceding post.

Robert

------------


Tips and tricks: multiple distros HOWTO

A reader wrote in asking for a feature about setting up
multiple Linux distributions on a hard disk. "You probably
do this more than anybody in the world making you the most
qualified to do this," he claimed and, as the 25 Linux and
BSD partitions on my two hard disks would be happy to
confirm, he probably wasn't too far from the truth. If I was
to set up a multiple distribution hard disk now, this is how
I'd go about it:

1. Partition your hard disk. If you have a new, empty
hard disk, you can partition it with a tool like Partition
Magic, or more cheaply, with QTParted included with
SystemRescueCD, Knoppix or other distributions.
SystemRescueCD is particularly suitable for this - it is a
small download and it doesn't mount any of your existing
hard drives or partitions by default. QTParted is a
graphical tool, so if you can drag a mouse, you can
partition hard disks. I normally create my first primary
partition (/dev/hda1, about 10GB) right at the beginning of
the hard disk (reserved for my primary OS), followed by
another primary partition (/dev/hda2, also about 10GB)
reserved for /home, followed by another primary partition
(/dev/hda3, around 1GB) reserved for swap. The rest of the
drive is then taken up by a large extended partition
(/dev/hda4), which can be sliced up to contain up to 64
logical partitions (/dev/hda5, /dev/hda6, /dev/hda7, and so
on). Since most modern distributions seems to be quite large
nowadays, I'd recommend giving the logical partitions around
4 - 6GB each.

2. Consider the OSs. Linux is particularly easy about
where it resides on the hard disk, but other operating
systems are much more picky. If you intend to keep Windows
on your system, remember that it must be installed on the
first partition of the first hard disk (at least that's how
it was with Windows 2000 and earlier versions, I am not sure
about Windows XP). FreeBSD is not that strict, but it
definitely wants to be placed on a primary partition, rather
than a logical one. If you still need Windows, you'll be
wise to install it first, before installing any Linux
distribution or BSD.

3. Install distributions. Once your system is
partitioned, you can start installing the distributions you
want. Even the simplest installers (such the one that comes
with Linspire) will give you an opportunity to specify where
to install the distribution, although you might have to
select an "advanced installation" option to do so. Let's say
you have installed Debian on /dev/hda1 (with its /home
partition on /dev/hda2) and now you are adding Mandrakelinux
to /dev/hda5, Fedora Core /dev/hda6, Linspire on /dev/hda7,
and Slackware on /dev/hda8. Since your hard disk is already
partitioned, you can safely skip any partitioning questions
the installer might provide.

4. Keep the same swap partition. No matter how many
Linux distributions you install on your hard disk, you only
need one swap partition. Many distribution installers will
detect and set it up automatically, but if not, you will
have to specify it manually (in our case it's at /dev/hda3).
It is safe to format the swap partition - no important data
are kept on it after you end your current Linux session and
reboot the system.

5. Don't keep the same home partition. As convenient as
this might sound, sharing the same home partition among
multiple distributions is asking for trouble. The reason is
that each distribution comes with a slightly different set
of application versions, the settings of which might not
always be compatible with another distribution's set. Yes,
you might very well get away with it, especially if all your
distributions are reasonably recent, but I would still
advise against this. If I want to share data between
different distributions (e.g your email folders), I normally
use symbolic links - just mount your main home partitions
(in our case 'mount /dev/hda2 /mnt/home' then link your mail
directory with 'ln -s /mnt/home/Mail ~/Mail'). As for
application settings (e.g. bookmarks, browser settings,
etc.), I normally copy them from my main distribution's home
partition to any new distribution's home partition.

6. Choose a boot loader. Historically, lilo was the only
bootloader on Linux, but this has changed and nowadays you
are more likely to see grub as the recommended boot loader
on most distributions (although lilo might still be provided
as an option). It doesn't matter which one you choose (it is
one of those vim vs emacs battles), both can serve equally
well for your purpose. The important thing is to place the
boot loaders of different distributions in the correct
place, while placing your main distribution's boot loader
into the master boot record (MBR). In our case, we'll place
the Mandrakelinux boot loader on /dev/hda5, (not /dev/hda),
the Fedora boot loader on /dev/hda6, the Linspire boot
loader on /dev/hda7 (Linspire is a bit more troublesome than
most; more on this in the next paragraph), and the Slackware
boot loader on /dev/hda8. Again, it doesn't matter which
boot loader you use - you can have lilo in /dev/hda, but use
grub in /dev/hda5 and vice versa.

7. Reset your main boot loader. Some distributions'
installers are particularly inflexible in the way they set
things up. Ark Linux and Linspire are among those that
insist on overwriting your master boot record without any
consideration for your other partitions. If that happens,
don't panic - the fix is quite simple. Boot into Linspire
(alternatively, boot any live CD, such as Knoppix), log in
as root, create a temporary directory with 'mkdir /mnt/tmp',
mount the partition occupied by your main distribution (in
our case /dev/hda1) with 'mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/tmp', and
chroot into it with 'chroot /mnt/tmp'. If your main boot
loader on that partition is lilo, then simply execute 'lilo'
on the command line; if it is grub, then execute 'grub',
then type 'setup (hd0)'. That should restore your master
boot record to what it was before you installed Linspire.
However, you still need to make changes to the Linspire boot
loader, so type Ctrl + D (to get out of the chroot-ed
partition), then open /etc/lilo.conf with your favourite
text editor. Change the line that reads 'boot=/dev/hda' to
'boot=/dev/hda7' (that's because Linspire is installed on
/dev/hda7 in our case), save the modified file, then execute
'lilo' on the command line.

8. Install new distribution. Every time you add a new
distribution to your hard disk and install its boot loader
on the same partition as the distribution itself, you will
need to add the two lines to the /etc/lilo.conf of your main
distribution's (Debian in our example) lilo, but you won't
need to modify /etc/lilo.conf of your newly added
distribution. For example, after installing Mandrakelinux on
/dev/hda5, you will add these two lines to your Debian's
/etc/lilo.conf:
other=/dev/hda5
label=Mandrake
Later you'll decide to install Fedora Core in
/dev/hda6, which will mean that you will add another two
lines to your Debian's /etc/lilo.conf:
other=/dev/hda6
label=Fedora
Don't forget to execute 'lilo' after any change you
make to /etc/lilo.conf.

9. Don't panic. If all of the above seems complicated at
first, rest assured that after you've installed your 20th
distribution, you'll be a multiboot expert advising all of
your local LUG members on these matters. As always, practice
makes perfect :-)

In article <kIKdnaL-DMe9adPeRVn-sQ@rcn.net>, Robert Glueck <rglk@web.de>
writes
>Here is the article on multiboot disk partitioning that I referred to
>in the preceding post.

Thanks, Robert - what a remarkably helpful article.
I have done something similar - though on a smaller scale - using
BootMagic on the Windows partition.
But this would be better if there were no Windows installed.
--
Chris

In article <ac-dneLSqdesetPenZ2dnUVZ_s-dnZ2d@rcn.net>, Robert Glueck
<rglk@web.de> writes
>I would first physically reformat the HD, e.g. with the appropriate
>utility on the CD that came with the HD.

Just a small point: I've never had a HDD come with a CD.
Do they usually come with one?
Can such a CD be downloaded?
--
Chris

Chris wrote:
> In article <ac-dneLSqdesetPenZ2dnUVZ_s-dnZ2d@rcn.net>, Robert Glueck
> <rglk@web.de> writes
>
>> I would first physically reformat the HD, e.g. with the appropriate
>> utility on the CD that came with the HD.
>
>
> Just a small point: I've never had a HDD come with a CD.
> Do they usually come with one?
> Can such a CD be downloaded?

If your OEM put the HDD in your machine, most likely you
wouldn't have such a CD. If you bought the drive
separately, a HDD diagnostics and utilities CD is often
included.

Otherwise you can download the programs from the HDD
manufacturer's support website and burn them to a bootable
CD. Examples are SeaTools Desktop Edition v.3.00.07 from
Seagate and Diag504c from Western Digital. Or you could
download and burn to CD the "Ultimate Boot CD v.3.3" (with
INSERT v.1.2.14 included); it contains most of the above
programs plus additional HDD diagnostics from other
manufacturers. The bootable System Rescue CD also contains
utilities for HDD formatting, I think.

Perhaps you could also use fdisk or some Norton utility in
Windows. The physical reformatting step isn't crucial. It
just cleans up your HDD more thoroughly than the standard
partitioning and formatting tools do, I believe.

The System Rescue CD and Ultimate Boot CD are worth having
on hand in any case.

Robert

Chris <nospam@[127.0.0.1]>:
> 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

Why? Where's the fun in those two?


--
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
(*) http://www.spots.ab.ca/~keeling
- -