RedHat 9 and RedHat 7.2 on one bootloader

[snorlaxx 0]

Hi!

Just a quick question... is it possible to install 2 releases of RH in one PC? and both are using the same boot loader? I tried doing this and it seems to be impossible. Maybe there is a restriction I failed to read or there might be a work around on this one.

 

Background: I am doing this because I have RH9 originally installed and HardHat dev kit i got is compatible with RH7.2 only. so i have to "downgrade" my OS to 7.2. Since many files are already in RH9, i got another HDD and installed RH7.2 there having GRUB bootloader of Enigma on MBR. I expected it to behave like RH + WinXX where i can choose which OS to boot, but it wasnt.

 

Thanks everyone!

[danleff 0]

Sure it is!

 

As I understand it, you have RH 7.2's grub as the bootloader now?

 

Post where each root partition is and what your grub.conf or menu/list is and we will walk you through it.

 

Also, is the MBR on the first or second disk?

 

You can also add windows to boot as well, if you really want to!

[Dapper Dan 0]

Danleff, I want to put a second Linux on my box too. I'm not really sure how to lay it out or how the partitions are set up in the fstab. I'll also be interested in following this post.

[danleff 0]

I'll do the best that I can with grub, I am really better at lilo.

 

I have 5 distros on my system, not including Windows, using lilo.

 

What the issue seems to be is the age of the grub bootloader.

 

I like to stick with the newest version, so that it is easier to track how to map the drives.

 

Different distros and even different versions of the same distro may handle partitons and drive designations differently.

 

Raid capable boards are a different story. Mandrake handled my raid capable board differently than Lindows, for example. Not necessarily using raid, but the designations that it gave my three drives, just using the third IDE interface (w/o raid mirrored drives).

 

My old motherboard allowed the use of the its ist raid connector as an ide drive.

 

The best way that I found to do this is to allow the install of the most recently installed distro w/o allowing a bootloader to be installed, or installing the bootloader to a floppy to test the system.

 

This way you can add the lilo or grub entries to the already existing grub or lilo bootloader that you have on the MBR.

 

Of course the best senario is to have the drives already present BEFORE installing any distros, so that grub or lilo has already done the core mapping of the drives for you.

 

As you know, Dapper Dan, you can use Mandrake's partitioning tool or PartitionMagic to add your ext3 or whatever filesystems for the second distro install.

 

Granted, during their installs, Mandrake or RedHat want you to use (or give you a choice) multiple partitons, or allow you to put all the files on ./, or one partition.

 

Once you have your layout and know what the partitions are, you can add the entries for the latest distro to grub or lilo for vmlinuz and initrd.

 

The newer distros will automatically add windows to the mix when they are installed. I don't know if this was an option in RedHat 7.2 yet.

 

So, knowing what the boot/root designations are on the existing partitions will aide in adding entries to the already installed grub.

 

This way snorlaxx can choose which distro to boot in grub.

[Dapper Dan 0]

Quote:

I have 5 distros on my system...

danleff, I would kill to see a screenshot of your HD from qtparted!! 8)

[Dapper Dan 0]

Quote:

This way you can add the lilo or grub entries to the already existing grub or lilo bootloader that you have on the MBR.

Do you think it would matter if grub is installed to a /boot partition?

[outstream 0]

Quote:

I have 5 distros on my system, not including Windows, using lilo

WhaoWw :x

[danleff 0]

The issue about root vs. boot has always confused me. It should work, as long as the partition designations are correct.

 

Anyhow, here is a screenshot of hda. My other distros are hdb and hdd, which hold other distros. See where I made some errors in laying out the partitions?

 

http://home.nycap.rr.com/danleff/images/snapshot2.png

 

And hdb, which has plenty of space left.

 

http://home.nycap.rr.com/danleff/images/snapshot3.png

 

Qtparted can't see hdd, but PartitionMagic can...hmm...

[Dapper Dan 0]

That's really something! :x It's all I can do to keep up with two! Thanks danleff!

[danleff 0]

Yea, I just got my SUSE 9 PRO disks from Linux CD (a Linux Compatible sponsor) and it detected all the partitions, set them up on icons and I installed the RedHat rpm for qtparted - all the drives and partitions are seen.

 

Now let's see if I can break the system with KDE 3.2 and kernel 2.6.3.

[Dapper Dan 0]

How do you set it up so one distro doesn't install over another on the same drive? If, say Mdk 9.2 installs intself on / and /home , how does the next distro you install know not to install itself to those partitions? I'm sure you rename them somehow or something. Can you go into some detail about this and maybe write a table out showing how it works with two different distros? Thanks!

[danleff 0]

This is one quirk that Mandrake's disk partitioning utility has. When you install Mandrake, at the boot prompt when the install cd loads, type in expert.

 

This begins the expert install. Then when you reach the menu for disk partitioning, choose custom partitioning. This prevents Mandrake from automatically assigning root to a previously populated ext2 or ext3...partition. You can then assign your previously formatted partitions to root, home or whatever.

 

If you do not choose expert install, I found that Mandrake tries to install root to a previous linux partition.

 

Fedora seemed to allow me to manually choose the designations.

 

Debian gives you a menu list of available partitions, then you just choose the one that you want.

 

Of course, make sure you know your partitions and what distros that you have on them/ where they are located.

 

What I have noticed is that most distros, that generally use one main partition, allow you to chose a previously formatted linux partition for the distro.

 

So, if you use qtparted or PartitionMagic to set up a linux filesystem ahead of time, you can use this partitin by choosing it during the install of the new distro.

[SoulNothing 0]

yeah i had the same issue with fedora and red hat how do you work two versions of linux onto one hard drive i have it set up like this

 

60 gig xp

25 gig redhat 9.0

25 gig fedora 1

1 gig linux swap

 

now fedora worked but as soon as i put in redhat it wiped my fedora partition.