best order of install for distros

**yowwww** · 05-13-2003

Well, I am at it once again... I am creating another multi-boot system.

Here are the distros:
Red Hat 9
Mdk 9.1
Suse 8.2 Pro

I am doing this on a 30 G drive so space is of no concern.

My question is whether anyone has installed these on the same machine before and if they noticed any best order of install. I don't really care about the order, but I wanna avoid problems since it will take a long time to do all three. I plan to use grub, but I noticed that suse's interface for the bootloader looks a little different and I usually don't use bootloader on multi-boot systems, but this time I am going to do that.
So when I am installing the second and the third, do I just install grub again and will it automatically add that additional distro to the grub menu at boot?
Hopefully I get a response soon cause I am downloading Mdk 9.1 right now and it will be done in about an hour. Also, I noticed that mdk 9.1 only has one main iso - is that all it requires now? I recall that mdk 8.2 had 3.

**yowwww** · 05-13-2003

ok, nevermind the above, what I want to know now is how to safely resize my /home partition in SuSE 8.2

**Dolda2000** · 05-13-2003

I guess that would be a job for resize2fs?

**yowwww** · 05-13-2003

it doesn't appear so...

Code:

 The  resize2fs  program does not manipulate the size of partitions.  If
       you wish to enlarge a filesystem, you must  first  make  sure  you  can
       expand  the  size  of the underlying partition first.  This can be done
       using fdisk&#40;8&#41; by deleting the  partition  and  recreating  it  with  a
       larger  size.

http://gd.tuwien.ac.at/linuxcommand....esize2fs8.html

I don't want to lose any information at all. I was going to create a multiboot system but I don't have enough primary partitions left over after installing SuSE so I want to resize my /home partition to take up the rest of the disk, but I have enough space as is, so if it can't be done, then it doesn't matter all that much.
I wonder if partition magic 8 would do it - I know it wouldn't let me make it any smaller, but I wonder if it could be used to enlarge it. I'll have to check out the partition magic site.

hmm - maybe not:
" Q: Can PartitionMagic 8 resize the cluster size of my file system?
A: PartitionMagic 8 allows you to resize clusters on FAT, FAT32, and NTFS file systems."

**Dolda2000** · 05-13-2003

resize2fs resizes the file system. That means that if you shrink your file system with resize2fs, it will most certainly become smaller, but the partition will be as large as before, ie. the filesystem won't occupy the entire partition. Then you can safely shrink the partition to end where your file system ends. So no, resize2fs doesn't do the entire job, but it does the first part of the job, and then fdisk does the second part. Please note that deleting a partition doesn't affect the data in it (unless you create a new partition there and use it for something). If you create a partition with the same starting point, the data will be left in place.

Btw., you didn't have to find that text on the internet; "man resize2fs" would have done just as good a job.

**yowwww** · 05-13-2003

thanks for the info, I think I might just leave it as is for now, there is enough space to work with for now, seems kinda risky and I'm not into doing a lot of research on it right now (which is what I would do so that nothing unsavory happens)

and as for man pages....

some of them are fairly good and some of them are absolute garbage where you have to read thru about 5,000 screens and then amalgamate the info you need - this is one of the advantages of a guide like mine as well as a close personal friend of everyone's: Google

**Dolda2000** · 05-14-2003

I don't think that you have anything to worry about when it comes to resize2fs. As far as I know, it's being used heavily in production environments.
I don't really get what you think is wrong with manpages. I find almost all of them very useful. I can, however, warmly recommend not reading them in a terminal, but with this:

Code:

man -t page | ggv -

**dahas** · 09-16-2007

Like You i had same problem but a litle more complicated so i chose to use evms to link 8 hdd to 1 biger disk.
Evms is a manager who deal with any kind of fs and let you to manage them from only 1 interface from comand line, ncurse or gui. He did that for me like link unused space for me (no partition defined) and make a link drive who have linked 8 separate hdd. Adding a new hdd to the link drive dont mean lose data.
If u need more help about this way or my problem solution be my guest to ask me.

Thread Tools

Display

best order of install for distros

Posting Permissions