[SOLVED] help with triple booting please...

[xan16]

Well I've decided to give linux another shot and am playing around with two distros, ubuntu 9.04 64-bit and Sabayon 4.01 32-bit. Currently, I have /boot as a seperate partition. I can only boot into one or the other and having difficulty configuring GRUB. I switch out what is in the two different partitions regularly so thats why I'd like a seperate boot partition. Is this recommended or should I do away with the seperate boot? How would I set GRUB up this way?

sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 74.3 GB, 74355769344 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9039 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x79ae7387

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1        9038    72597703+   7  HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/sdb: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xddaaddaa

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1   *           1       45136   362554888+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sdb2           45137       45658     4192965   83  Linux
/dev/sdb3           45659       60018   115346700    5  Extended
/dev/sdb4           60019       60801     6289447+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdb5           45659       50880    41945683+  83  Linux
/dev/sdb6           50881       60018    73400953+  83  Linux

sdb2 is /boot partition
sdb5 is Ubuntu
sdb6 is Sabayon

[Jonathan183]

Personally I would only create a separate boot partition if the machine did not support boot from large partitions or above 1024 cyclinder limit. A boot partition introduces additional complication for very little gain. You can fix most issues these days using a live CD ... so I suggest you try without a separate boot partition and see if things work ... if they do otherwise you can resize partitions and create the boot partition afterwards. But only make things more complicated if you need to

[yancek]

You could just make a samll separate Grub partition, explained how to do on Ubuntu at this site:

grub page

scroll down past this part for info on creating boot partition.

Another option is to just chainload if you are using the same two partitions to test different OS's. I've never used a separate boot partition for reasons explained by JJonathan183. The site above suggests a separate Grub partition makes more sense.

Chainload for sda5 and sda6

root (hd0,4)
chainloader +1

root (hd0,5)
chainloader +1

should work as long as you have Grub installed to the root of those partitions with each distro you install. You could also do the configfile method used by Opensuse.

[xan16]

Fantastic!

Thank you both Jonathan183 and yancek, your advice works perfectly.

Marked thread as solved.