Dual Boot Fedora+Other Linux OS Help

[ryman102990]

Hello all!

I have been playing around with linux for the past couple months. I have tried numerous distro's starting with ubuntu, then slackware, opensuse, ubuntustudio, artistx, fedora etc.

This helped give me a picture of what linux was really capable of. I have now decided that i prefer Ubuntu for some things, and Fedora for others. I like Fedora since i know how to install the realtime kernel from ccrma, and ubuntu is good for every day use.

What all this boils down to is that I would like to dual boot linux os's on a single hard drive. I have run into many problems from partition setup, to getting grub to recognize both os's, and to getting either one to boot at all.

Every time i have tried this it has resulted in me reinstalling a single linux distro. I would love it if anyone here could lend a hand.

Thanks! ryman102990

[Jonathan183]

My advice ...
partition hard drive the way you want
install first distro and during install install grub to MBR
check distro will boot
install second distro and during install install grub to root partition of second distro
restart system and add entry to grub /boot/grub/menu.lst manually to allow boot of second distro.

If you have already gone through the install process you may have partitions already ... post the output of

sudo fdisk -l
mount

from whichever distro you can boot from the hard drive.

[ryman102990]

Thanks for the reply! I will try that tonight. Now one of the things i was concerned with is using the same swap partition. Is that okay or will it not work, because both os's format the partition. Also, is it safe to use the same /home directory? i'm pretty sure the /home is safe but can't hurt to ask! thanks again

ryman102990

[Jonathan183]

The swap can be shared as long as you dont want to use suspend to disk.
A home partition can be shared, some similar threads here here here here here ... there is no right answers for all cases

[Chronomatic]

You shouldn't even need to mess with the /etc/grub/menu.lst file. Every time I have installed Fedora after Windows or Ubuntu, it has always detected the other OS's and put them in Grub automagically. The same thing happens when installing Ubuntu last as well. So, all you should have to worry about is getting an idea of how you want your partition layout to be.

[Jonathan183]

You shouldn't even need to mess with the /etc/grub/menu.lst file. Every time I have installed Fedora after Windows or Ubuntu, it has always detected the other OS's and put them in Grub automagically. The same thing happens when installing Ubuntu last as well. So, all you should have to worry about is getting an idea of how you want your partition layout to be.

That's not entirely true ... most versions of Linux will search for other Linux installs on the hard drive, but they appear to add current menu entries by copying existing menu entries from the other Linux distro grub ... This approach is fine until an update to kernel is applied to one of the other distros. Each distro will update its own grub menu only ... so if you are not careful you end up continuing to use the older kernel version.

[ryman102990]

I'm going to take a stab at dual boot right now. Not sure if I'll get a reply before I start, but any recommendations on which to install first? I'm probably going to start with fedora first.

[ryman102990]

install second distro and during install install grub to root partition of second distro
restart system and add entry to grub /boot/grub/menu.lst manually to allow boot of second distro.

I also just realized that I'm not sure what to enter into that .lst...

[Jonathan183]

To link grub menus in most cases you can use

title my other distro grub
root (hd0,0)
configfile /boot/grub/menu.lst
boot

Incase that does not work provided you have installed grub to the boot record of the distro partition then you can use

title my other distro grub
root (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

In both case replace (hd0,0) with root partition of the distro you want to access.
hd0,0 = sda1, hd0,1 = sda2, hd0,2 = sda3
hd1,0 = sdb1, hd1,1 = sdb2, hd1,2 = sdb3 etc.

[ryman102990]

thanks a lot! I'm working on it and I'll let you know how it works out for me! you've been a big help jon