Dual boot installation with two disks

[Gene Heskett]

On Tuesday 07 December 2004 08:21, 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?
If you can setup 2 or more partitions on the disk for the /
assignment of each install, its pretty straight forward.  I am doing
that one one box, a dual FC3RC3 install along with the BDI-46 install.

The /boot partition, /dev/hda1, contains all the vmlinuz-ver stuffs,
but the second line of each grub.conf entry has a different 
root=/dev/hdaX location where the X changes to point at that installs
/ directory.

>Do i have to create a swap partition for each distro?
swap is I believe, automaticly cleaned at 'swapon' execution, and I
am using the same swap for both installs without any problems here.

>What are chainload instructions?

Something like this in your /boot/grub/grub.conf to boot a dos/windows
installation:
-------------
#15
 title DOS
        rootnoverify (hd0,1)
        makeactive
        chainloader +1
-------------
The #15 is optional and means nothing other than to me as a way to
keep track of the default and fallback entries at the top of my
grub.conf.  Its a base 0 number.

That said, can anyone familiar with grubs limitations tell me how
many actual entries grub can handle?
  
The most I've ever had is 17 and I figured there had to be a limit
someplace, but I've not explored to find it as the limit just might be
a total refusal to boot.  Not a good thing(tm)

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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