dual boot Ubuntu, redhat

[Garrett85]

I am currently running dual boot Ubuntu with Windows Vista but Vista has long sence quite loading so I thought I might as well replace it with red hat or Fedora which I'M trying to learn anyway. How do I find out which partition my Ubuntu is on and which on Windows is on? I don't wan't to screw this up and delete my Ubuntu. Thanks.

[Rubberman]

Boot into Ubuntu and run this command from a command line window: sudo fdisk -l
This will show you what partitions are on your disc drive(s). It will tell which are NTFS and which are Linux. Obviously, the NTFS partition(s) are your Vista and possibly your Windows recovery volume. Those you can nuke. You do want to edit your grub configuration file in order to get rid of the Windows boot entry as well.

[Garrett85]

Thanks, but how do I edit my grub config file? And does it matter if I do this before or after removing the partitions? Thanks again.

[Rubberman]

Thanks, but how do I edit my grub config file? And does it matter if I do this before or after removing the partitions? Thanks again.

Either should be ok, but before would be preferable. For current Ubuntu systems (that use grub2), this isn't so simple as editing a configuration file. You need to edit/remove entries from /etc/grub.d and then run grub-mkconfig with the output to /boot/grub/grub.cfg to update the configuration file (script). Personally, I think the grub2 methodology is a major step backward, as least as far as boot process simplification is concerned... With earlier versions of Grub, you only need to remove the system entry from /boot/grub/grub.conf, and adjust the default boot partition if necessary. Takes about 3 seconds, and very little chance of mucking the system altogether, unlike Grub2.

[devils casper]

GRUB2 detects all installed OSes without any problem. Best way is, disable other OS detection and regenerate GRUB Menu.

cd /etc/grub.d
sudo chmod -x 30_os-prober
sudo update-grub

Above code will regenerate GRUB Menu and will not detect Windows OS.

[Garrett85]

I've just deleted all the NTFS partitoins as you said would be ok, then I installed redhat and told it to use free space that was on the disk. But now I don' t see Ubuntu on the grub loader anymore, pleaes help. Thanks.

[devils casper]

Installers of RedHat and RedHat based distros ( CentOS, Fedora etc.) do not detect other installed OSes. You have to add entry of Ubuntu in RH GRUB Menu manually.

Method 1 :

Mount / partition of Ubuntu in RH and navigate to its boot folder. Note down kernel version and create new entry in /boot/grub/grub.conf file of RH.

Method 2 :

RE-install GRUB of Ubuntu. Boot up from Ubuntu LiveCD and follow instructions from here [13. Reinstalling GRUB 2 from the LiveCD] to re-install GRUB2. GRUB2 will detect RH and it will add an entry of RH in Menu.

I would suggest you to go for Method 2.

[Garrett85]

Thanks, I'M working on that now.

[devils casper]

Do let us know how it goes.