Dual booting 2 linux syatems

[James Wilkinson]

Ed Lewis wrote:
> 	I have a 64bit AMD 3000 computer with dual hard drives, I have two 
> copies of Linux installed on them. FC2-64 on one of them and Suse linux 
> 9.1 installed on the other. They both boot with grub and I have 
> configured /boot/grub/grub.conf in Fedora to attempt to boot the Suse 
> system. All I am able to get is an error 15- file not found.

There are two ways of configuring grub to do this. You've been told
about one way: in your case, the Fedora grub is on the master boot
record (MBR). You give it a copy of the "other" distribution's kernel
and initrd.

The other way is to chain grubs. This involves having two grubs
installed: in your case, Fedora on the MBR, and the SuSE grub on a
partition (normally, this would either be its root partition or its
/boot partition). There's normally the option to install grub to
one of these during installation.

In the Fedora grub, you set up a stanza like this:

title Other
        rootnoverify (hd1,5)
        chainloader +1

When you select this, the Fedora grub will hand over control to whatever
is in the boot sector of hd1,5 (which in my case is /dev/hdc6). This
happens to be the SuSE grub: you see the SuSE grub screen and get to
choose a SuSE kernel.

This has the advantage that now SuSE "knows" about how it is booting:
SuSE updates can update its grub.conf and it will all Just Work.

These options aren't mutually exclusive: you can set up one "stanza" in
Fedora's grub to boot from a kernel image that you've copied, and the
stanza I've just given you to chain-load. Then you can choose how you
want to boot at boot time.

I must admit that I haven't tried this with the other OS being SuSE.
But it works splendidly for Fedora Rawhide, where grub is updated so
often it's a real pain trying to keep your grub up to date.

Hope this helps,

James.

-- 
E-mail address: james | "If you make everything a life and death proposition
@westexe.demon.co.uk  | you're going to have problems.  For one thing, you'll
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