install ES3 dual-boot onto Fedora2 doesn't get grub.conf right

[linux r]

On Mon, 08 Nov 2004 16:04:13 -0800, Rick Stevens
<rstevens at vitalstream.com> wrote:
> Stuart Sears wrote:
> > On Friday 05 Nov 2004 22:24, Rick Stevens wrote:
> >
> >>David Morgan wrote:
> >>Could you reverse the process (install ES first, then FC) to see if the
> >>Fedora version of anaconda is smarter and recognizes ES as a Linux
> >>implementation?
> >
> > trust me, it doesn't. (at least not in my experience)
> 
> Lovely.  Another case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand
> is doing.  Sheesh!
> 
> 
> 
> > My laptop currently dual boots ES and FC2 - installed in that order. The
> > easiest way for me to handle this (especially as FC3 or poss RHEL4 beta will
> > replace FC2 shortly) was to install the FC2 bootloader to FCs / fs and use a
> > chainloader line in the ES grub.conf file.
> > so it now looks a bit like this:
> > title Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES (2.4.21-20.EL)
> >         root (hd0,0)
> >         kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.21-20.EL ro root=LABEL=/ hdc=ide-scsi vga=791
> >         initrd /initrd-2.4.21-20.EL.img
> > title Fedora Core (bootloader)
> >         root (hd0,6)
> >         chainloader +1
> > but then my FC2 install is all on one / filesystem...
> 
> Now that's ugly.  Ah well.
> 
> >>If the FC anaconda handles it properly, then I'd file a bugzilla report
> >>with Red Hat so that they use the Fedora anaconda in the next release of
> >>ES/AS/EL/WS.
> >
> > may be worth doing - there are alot of bugs relating to anaconda in bugzilla
> > atm, but none that seem to refer to this issue.
> 
> I agree.  You would think that it could recognize other Linuxen on
> the system, though, wouldn't you?
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> - Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
> - VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
> -                                                                    -
> -         "OK, so you're a Ph.D. Just don't TOUCH anything!"         -
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> 
> 
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> 

I ran into this same sort of thing.  I have a dual boot (xp for the
remainder of the semester then it's history) along with White Box
Enterprise Linux 3.  I am only using about 40 G of my 80G drive;
however, for the life of  me I could not get FC1 to install the other
day.  You get to the install screen and it wants to partition, but
will not autopartition either.  

I saw no way to do it manually, short of getting a super-duper fdisk
from another distro perhaps, going ahead and creating additional
partition schemes, THEN attempting
the install.  Maybe the way to do it is to create a kickstart boot
disk, copy the installation files to a directory on another networked
machine, and do the install that way.  I have done this and it seemed
to give you a little more choice as far as 'target' directory location
and that is what we want.

The error was something to do with not being able to mark a new
paritition as active.  Theoretically, only the partitions (minimum of
/ and /boot) that you are using, are 'alive'.  So it shouldn't matter
what else is on the drive.  And generally that IS the case with other
partitons - IOW, Linux's fdisk sees fat/vfat/ntfs etc and knows to
leave them alone.  But if there are pre-existing Linux partitions,
fdisk couldn't 'see' them as 'seperate' and go ahead with its
business.   And can you have two active partitions?  

Does anyone know if another distro has a better fdisk?  Maybe KNoppix
or Debian's would be good to look at, I haven't used those so I can't comment.

Cheers
Marc