Dual booting fc5 & fc6

[Jim Cornette]

George Hare wrote:
> Many thanks to Jim, Robert and Nigel. When I installed fc6 I got
> /1/boot/....I thought my selection at that point would auto-magically
> put fc6 in my selections at boot time. It seemed to go just like that
> when I dual booted RH8 and NT, but I guess much has changed since
> then. 

I don't recall any other OS entries ever being added for any Linux OS 
automatically. I did see DOS and win32 added to grub entries though.

>I intended to eliminate the last fc5 under the "chainload + 1"
> but you guys are a bit over my head here and I had no idea you could
> install grub more than once...not that I want to yet.

Nobody offered a solution at the time,but a statement was made that 
having to edit the grub.conf from one installation to the other 
distribution was something that did not interest them. Later on through 
experimentation with setups I figured out how to chainload one 
distribution from the other. If you have two seperate /boot partitions 
for each distribution, you have grub for each one.
Anyway, the greatest advantage to chainloading vs. editing grub each 
time a release gets a new kernel added or removed. With multiple 
chainloaded grub setups, the housekeeping is done by the package 
management utilities and you do not have to edit your grub file all the 
time. I personally do not miss the manual editing from distro to distro.

> /dev/hda1 is where I have fc5, /dev/hda2 is a swap, /dev/hda3 is
> where fc6 is and has no mount point according to the LVM, /dev/hda4
> is an extended partition ?

hda4 will contain all of your partitions above 4 and is not a usable 
partition. It just holds your partitions above hda4 that will be located 
in your extended partition. So partition 5 would probably start at the 
same cylinder as the extended partition hda4 begins. From that point on 
will be your partition 6 through your maximum desired partition number 
within dev hda4.
Simplistically, if extended partition hda4 cylinder started at 1000 and 
hda5 started at 1000 and ended at 1050, you can add another partition 
starting at 1051 through 1111. The extented partition may end at say 
2000, so you can contain all the additional partitions in that space. 
hda4 is of course not mountable or anything.

I did not ask for that(110G), then /dev/hda5 is swap,
> then it says I have 110G of unpartitioned and uninitialized space on 
> hda. I thought the partitioning possibilities were a bit confusing; 
> but then, I find many things confusing. 

You might want to search for partitioning hard drives on primary and 
extended partitions for more understanding.

Below is my fc5 grub config.
> I know you guys are busy and don't always have time to hold someone's
>  hand, but I really appreciate your help. # grub.conf generated by
> anaconda
> #
> # Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
> # NOTICE:  You do not have a /boot partition.  This means that
> #          all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /, eg.
> #          root (hd0,0)
> #          kernel /boot/vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/hda1
> #          initrd /boot/initrd-version.img
> #boot=/dev/hda
> default=0
> timeout=8
> splashimage=(hd0,0)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
> hiddenmenu
> title Fedora Core (2.6.18-1.2200.fc5)
>     root (hd0,0)
>     kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-1.2200.fc5 ro root=LABEL=/1 rhgb quiet
>     initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.18-1.2200.fc5.img
> title Fedora 6
> root (hd0,2) /1/boot/grub/grub.conf
> chainloader + 1

I'm not familiar with this sort of information that you entered 
immediately above. Does it work? It looks like it might reference the 
FC6 grub file and allow booting as referenced in the grub.conf file. If 
so, I might try such an entry.

> title Fedora Core (2.6.15-1.2054_FC5)
>     root (hd0,0)
>     kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5 ro root=LABEL=/1 rhgb quiet
>     initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5.img
> 
> George hare

Jim

My chainloaded grub.conf contains the below:

cat /etc/grub.conf
# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE:  You have a /boot partition.  This means that
#          all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg.
#          root (hd1,0)
#          kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/hdb4
#          initrd /initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/hdb1
default=0
timeout=5
splashimage=(hd1,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title Fedora Core (2.6.18-1.2798.fc6)
         root (hd1,0)
         kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6 ro root=LABEL=/80g rhgb quiet
         initrd /initrd-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6.img
title Fedora Core (2.6.18-1.2784.fc6)
         root (hd1,0)
         kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-1.2784.fc6 ro root=LABEL=/80g rhgb quiet
         initrd /initrd-2.6.18-1.2784.fc6.img
title Other
         rootnoverify (hd0,0)
         chainloader +1



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