Installing FC3 on second hard disk

Paul Howarth paul at city-fan.org
Wed Feb 16 14:35:16 UTC 2005


Hello,

please don't post HTML mail to this mailing list.

Stephen Ng wrote:
> I would like to install FC3 on a second hard disk. I understand that 
> this is possible with almost all distributions. The question I have is - 
> If I want to do this without causing problems with my current 
> installation of RedHat 9 and Windows XP on the first (original) drive 
> what do I need to do with grub and grub.conf to make sure that after 
> installation of FC3 I can still boot into RedHat or Windows XP whenever 
> I need to. I would still want grub installed on the original first 
> drive, but have it point to FC3 on the second disk so that I can 
> optionally boot FC3 or my original RedHat/XP. Booting from floppy or 
> other such work around would be messy so I would prefer not to go down 
> this route.
> 
> I understand that it would be best to create a separate swap and boot 
> partition on the second drive, which is fine by me. I have not tried it 
> yet so I am guessing that if I start the FC3 install process, somewhere 
> down the line when it installs grub, it would simply overwrite my 
> current grub configuration. Is this right? If so what will I need to do 
> to protect my current grub config? Will simply copying it to a safe 
> place, then restoring it after installing FC3 and then manually editing 
> it to add the FC3 parameters be the correct thing to do?
> 
> And by the way, what will be the correct grub.conf settings to boot from 
> the second hard disk?
> 
> I would appreciate any help on this question.

When installing FC3, have it install grub in the boot/root partition 
instead of the Master Boot Record. Then configure your existing 
bootloader on your first hard disk to chain-load the newly-installed FC3 
grub.

Which bootloader are you currently using?

Paul.




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