Dual boot installation with two disks

[Jim Cornette]

A. Lanza wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-12-02 at 13:18, Jim Cornette wrote:
> 
>>Grub can boot several installations. I boot 4 seperate installations 
>>within two hard disks. (one ms, three linux)
>>
>>The best setups seem to be obtained from installing individual boot 
>>partition for each installation and installing the last installation 
>>into /MBR and add chainload instructions for each distribution. 
>>(advanced boot options)
>>
> 
> How can i do that?
> Do i have to create a swap partition for each distro?
> What are chainload instructions?
> 
> 

Basically, you can use the same swap partition for all distributions 
(Except the non-linux distro). The way I have the installations on the 
primary disk is to have a 5 gig ME partition (hda1), then a boot 
partition of 100 MB (hda2) and /home as hda3. I also have the rest of 
the first linux distribution on / (hda4). I install grub on the boot 
partition (hda2) and use an existing swap on the second hard drive for 
this installation as well. During the installation there is a choice for 
advanced bootloader options. Selecting this option will let you change 
the grub installation to be installed in hda2. It will also have a 
choice for you tof add additional installations with pulldown menus. You 
can select to add any other installation that you have installed within 
the boot partitions, such as hdb1 on the secondary disk.
If this installation is not completed yet, you can still add this 
option. You will have to rinse, lather and repeat the similar process 
for your second installation.
If you also have an installation that is either off in the later portion 
of the disk or in an extended partition, you can install this 
installation with it's own /boot, /home and / partitons and use the same 
swap partition between installations. Since this installation would not 
be grub bootable, grub would have to be installed in the MBR of the 
primary drive (hda).

I'm not on the computer that has the special setup, but you should have 
no problems after getting familiar with the advanced options in the 
installer. One thing to keep in mind is that the later portions of grub 
are installed in /boot/grub and the data is kept seperate for each 
installation. Each Linux installation will maintain its own kernel 
entries when it needs to be updated and will have a seperate grub menu. 
You can change the splashimages if having different menus for different 
installations becomes confusing.

I hope this is understandable. In the archives are example grub.conf 
files for this subject.

Jim