Multi boot with Fedora, XP, and second Linux distro

[Jonathan Berry]

On 6/4/05, Claude Jones <> wrote:
> I have a dual-boot box with XP on my primary drive and FC3 on the second; I
> would like to add one, and perhaps two additional distros. I have been
> researching multi-boot but keep turning up pages that are really old. Is this
> something that is simple to explain for one of you, or can someone point me
> to a more up to date howto? I'm thinking of adding FC4 and perhaps Mepis on
> the box.
> --
> Claude Jones
> Bluemont, VA, USA

Hi Claude,

It's fairly straight-forward.  Oliver gave you a good overview, but
here is a little more detail.  You'll need free hard disk space or
empty partitions to install to; you cannot install it on the same
partition like you can with Windows.  You can either add a drive or
use some exisiting partitions that you aren't using (if you have any).
 If you need to repartition a drive, that's a little more complicated.
Once you have that figured out, you can just install the new distro to
that partition (or partitions, however you care to do it).  Tell it to
leave the others alone.
When you come to installing the boot-loader, install it to the boot
partition instead of the MBR of the disk.  We'll let the FC3 GRUB
chainload to the other distros, just like it does with Windows (or
pick your favorite to be primary, you'll just have to reinstall FC3
GRUB to its boot partition then).  This will let each distro manage
its own boot-loader.  Then just add entries to the FC3 /etc/grub.conf
like:

title Fedora Core 4
rootnoverify (hd1,3)
chainloader +1

The (hd1,3) should be changed to match the disk and partition where
FC4 is installed.  You can do the same thing with Mepis or whatever
else.
A note on sharing partitions.  You can share a swap partition with no
worries as long as you don't use suspend to disk in one of the linux
distros (this probably doesn't work anyway).  You can share some data
partitions, and if you use different usernames, you can share the home
partition (if you have a multiple partition scheme).  If you use the
same username you could run into issues with config files.  For
instance, FC4 uses Gnome 2.10, while FC3 has 2.8 so something could
have changed, or different distros may have different options for some
programs.  It might work okay, but it's probably easier not to have to
deal with it.  You can always mount the other root partitions so you
can access data from the other distros.
I don't know of any good howtos for this, but if you have any
questions or run into any problems, just let us know.

Jonathan