Removing 1 of the 2 opensuse releases

[suselearner]

I posted a query here earlier about removing a release of openSuse but this question is now the reverse. Previously it was about removing the newer version but it turns out that it now does everything needed so the older now-unsupported version should be deleted.

Perhaps the answer is the same but here goes and pardon my lack of in-depth knowledge of linux.

There are two releases of opensuse - 10.2 and 11.0. The system upon start-up defaults to 11.0. I would like to completely remove the 10.2 version. How does one go about getting rid of older versions (in fact there are 2 installations upon start-up of 10.2)

Thanks for tackling this.

[MikeTbob]

Well if these are seperate installs then they must be on seperate partitions. You could just fdisk/format the partition that contains the OS you want to remove. Then you need to edit grub so that it doesn't present you with the choice to boot the offending release.

[D-cat]

... providing that grub isn't taking its configuration from the 10.2 partition. Thought not likely, have a copy of Supergrub burned to a CD prior to nuking the 10.2 partition... just in case.

[suselearner]

Grub (boot loader) indicates that the 10.2 partition has the menu. 11.0 the release I want to keep in on sda1

Message is "OpenSUSE 10.2 (/dev/sda5) Menu configfile=/boot/grub/menulst root=/dev/sda5

So maybe it's not so simple as eliminating the 10.2 partition?

Thanks to you both for your assistance on this but it looks to be good to go slow.

[D-cat]

Not necessarily. If the menu item specifies a partition (like /dev/sda5), it's often making a reference to a file on a different partition.

Just in case though, what I'd suggest here is (besides having SuperGrub handy, which can fix this if it goes awry) to boot into your SuSE 11, go to Yast -> System -> Boot Loader, and have it re-install Grub. It should make sure then that the config and menu.lst is drawn of the current partition.

After that, and you're sure there's no data on the 10.2 partition you're going to need, it should then be safe to nuke the 10.2 partition and re-purpose it to your needs.