partition tip ?

Michal Jaegermann michal at harddata.com
Tue Jan 29 04:16:37 UTC 2008


On Mon, Jan 28, 2008 at 07:22:09PM -0800, Andrew Farris wrote:
> Arne Chr. Jorgensen wrote:
> >It's possible to have dual boot, like Fedora + Windows.  Is it not possible
> >to  have a  dual  boot,  like  FC6 and F8 ?
> 
> Yes you can do that, but there are a few complications.  Fedora by default 
> labels the partitions in a simple way (LABEL=/, LABEL=/home) and mounts 
> these by label.

Anaconda is smart enough to create labels which do not conflict with
already existing ones.  At least this was the case when I was adding
new installations on the same machine.  I could redo later these
labels to be consistent across a particular installation but this is
only for my own sanity.  I may have five or six distros, between
Fedora and CentOS and x86_64 and i386, on my test box at a given
moment.

If you have multiple Linux installations on one host then it is a
very good idea to have one "master boot partition", used by grub
installed on MBR, with a menu which chainloads grubs, with boot
sectors installed on partitions, for all instances.  You will see
why on the first kernel update.  The very first boot may require
some "manual work" before boot menus were edited.

That it may be not so easy to get if you did not plan things that
way from the very start but in any case one can get pretty close to
such organization.

If you are messing around with partitioning layout then it is a
really advisable to have a good backup unless your data are truly
disposable.  It is possible to recover from many partitioning
disasters but if you have to ask how to do that then it is likely
already too late.  OTOH if you have backups then it could be
simpler just to remake a layout of your disks and restore what
you need from those backups.

   Michal




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