Dual boot installation with two disks

[Paul Howarth]

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?

Suppose you have three distros installed (in order):

DistA, with /boot installed on /dev/hda1
DistB, with /boot installed on /dev/hdb3
DistC, with /boot installed on /dev/hdb2

For DistA and DistB, install the bootloader on the first sector of the /boot 
partition for that distro (i.e. /dev/hda1 and /dev/hdb3 respectively).

For DistC, install grub in the MBR and add (using the advanced boot options 
screen in the installer, or manually by editing /etc/grub.conf for DistC after 
boot):

DistA
	rootnoverify (hd0,0)
	chainloader +1
DistB
	rootnoverify (hd1,2)
	chainloader +1

The DistA entry chain-loads DistA's bootloader from /dev/hda1 and the DistB 
entry chain-loads DistB's bootloader from /dev/hdb3.

Paul.