how to install windows xp , red hat and mandrake linux

[mramardeepsingh 0]

hi friends

i want to know is it possible to have two types of linux on same pc along with windows

 

i am having windows xp and fedora core 3 linux installed on my pentium 4 pc

 

i want to install mandrake 10.1 linux along with windows xp and red hat fedora core 3 linux

 

is that possible.

please tell me how

 

thanks

[Mel 0]

Yes , two or more versions of linux are running

happily alongside xp on a lot of computers.

 

A little information would help answer the how part.

Do you have more than one hard drive,or do you

want to put them all on one drive?

 

What os is installed and is it ok to remove and reinstall ?

 

As much information as you can give on your hardware.

( different hardware needs different tweaks.)

 

[martinltpm 0]

I managed to put Debian 3.1 and Suse 9.0 on a Dell latitude 810 along side WinXP. Not much tweaking except with the grub config file, had to rewrite a few times (and one attempt with lilo). All on one 80G harddrive, Pentium M. Before I had a Sony Vaio AMD with Suse, Debian and WinXp, but I had to use a floppy to boot Debian (I have learned some since). I do miss that Sony.

martin

 

[mramardeepsingh 0]

@mel

i am having only one harddrive, and i dont want to have another hard drive for the same.

my pc configuration is

p4 intel 865 g motherboard, 256 mb ram

currently i have fedora core 3 and xp installed and i want to install mandrake 10.1 along with above two.

 

yeh i am ready format or delete or reinstall my current operating systems.

you just tell me how can i have windows xp, fedora core 3 and mandrake 10.1 on same pc on same harddisk.

plz help me

[danleff 0]

As long as you have enough hard drive space, there is no need to reinstall any OS. How large is your hard drive and is it an ide hard drive?

 

You need to have some free space on the hard drive, or make room for the Mandrake installation.

 

Are you using any partitioning or have any partitioning software currently that you can use? I have six distros on one machine that can boot fine. I use PartitionMagic, as it resizes my partitions withe ease and make it much easier to allocate what space that I need for a new installation.

 

Mandrake's partitioning tool will work fine under most circumstances.

 

What is the layout and space allocation of your current partitions as they now stand?

[cashman31 0]

I was once having win98, XP, mandrake 10.1 & knoppix on my system.All running fine without any conflict.

First of all let me clarify that i have 2 hdd 80 GB each.

1 hdd was dedicated only to windows & the other to linux.

I first installed knoppix

then installed mandrake 10.1 on a different partition.

this wrote out the MBR ofr knoppix.

I coppied following files to /boot dir of mandrake from knoppix:

system.map, initrd.img, vmlinuz

edit /grub/menu.lst file as

 

title "name of new distro"

root(hd1,0)

kernel/boot/vmlinuz "kernel no" ro root=LABEL=/initrd/boot/initrd "kernel no" .img

 

 

try out.

it worked fine for me.

[danleff 0]

yes, you can do this, but be careful not to reference the wrong vmlinuz, initrd or root= values files on boot. A better method would be to keep all these files in their respective locations (not move any) and alter grub as follows;

 

If Knoppix is on hdb1 (hd1,0)

and Mandrake is on hdb2 (hd1,1)

 

title Knoppix

root(hd1,0)

kernel /boot/vmlinuz "kernel no" root=/dev/hdb1 ro

initrd /boot/initrd "kernel no" .img

 

title Mandrake

root(hd1,1)

kernel /boot/vmlinuz "kernel no" root=/dev/hdb2 ro

initrd /boot/initrd "kernel no".img

 

This aviods any potential conflicts with like kernels (vmlinuz & initrd files) and booting to the incorrect root filesystem of each distro. It also keeps things neat and in order.

 

Some distros will make a symlink to vmlinuz or initrd, so you want to minimize the chances of incorrect references being placed in grub. For this reason, you want to avoid adding any vmlinuz or initrd files to one single distro's /boot directory.

 

Or if you have to do this, make a separate sub-directory in the /boot directory to keep these files apart.Then reference them in grub appropriately. For example;

 

root (hd1,0)

kernel /boot/knoppix/vmlinuz.....

 

and;

 

kernel /boot/whateverdistro/vmlinuz....

 

This will become apparent as you choose to upgrade to a new kernel version and add these values to your working grub.

 

Remember, as you add each new distro, if you choose to allow the newer distro to overwrite the MBR, the new grub should detect and write entries for each proceding distro that it detects. If it fails to do so, you need to add any that are missing manually.

[cashman31 0]

I agree with danleff as I had problems when i updated knoppix to the latest version & ended up formatting entire linux partition and re installing everything.