Dual booting w/fc5 and fc6

[Jim Cornette]

George Hare wrote:
> Hi All, I am somewhat new to grub and dual booting. I had fc5 86_64
> and was very pleased with it's performance (more likely my ability to
> perform on it) so I decided to try dual booting fc5 and fc6 and when I
> saw the "chainloader +" come up...I was at a loss. I manned and
> searched but everrthing I found was to do with xp. I have 160g and
> should (I think) be able to put many distros on thier. Any pointers or
> help would be appreciated.
> 

The install that you want to be the master controller of booting should 
be installed in the master boot record. The secondary install should 
have grub installed in the booting partition.

My setup is as shown below. The install marked as HDB is my Development 
install and I chose to install grub in /dev/hdb1 and the first partition.
FC6, the controlling installation is installed in the MBR and XP is 
chainloaded.
This setup works great for me, except Dell or for some other reason, the 
slave on the primary controller was disabled in BIOS. Fedora recognized 
it, but grub did not with the funky BIOS setting. It should work if your 
BIOS settings as not crazy as was mine initially.

Choose the advanced boot loader option during installation and Edit the 
Primary installation grub to add the chainloader entry for your new 
install. I did not add the swap on the primary installations LVM, the 
installer added this entry.


  cat 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 (hd0,1)
#          kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/hda5vol/LogVol00
#          initrd /initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/hda
default=0
timeout=4
splashimage=(hd0,1)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
# hiddenmenu
title XP
         rootnoverify (hd0,0)
         chainloader +1
title Fedora Core (2.6.18-1.2798.fc6)
         root (hd0,1)
         kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6 ro root=/dev/hda5vol/LogVol00
         initrd /initrd-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6.img

title Fedora Core (2.6.18-1.2784.fc6)
         root (hd0,1)
         kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-1.2784.fc6 ro root=/dev/hda5vol/LogVol00
         initrd /initrd-2.6.18-1.2784.fc6.img
title HDB Disk  Install
         rootnoverify (hd1,0)
         chainloader +1

My development install is setup as below.
cat /etc/fstab
LABEL=/80g              /                    ext3    defaults        1 1
LABEL=/boot80g          /boot                ext3    defaults        1 2
devpts                  /dev/pts             devpts  gid=5,mode=620  0 0
tmpfs                   /dev/shm             tmpfs   defaults        0 0
LABEL=/home80g          /home                ext3    defaults        1 2
proc                    /proc                proc    defaults        0 0
sysfs                   /sys                 sysfs   defaults        0 0
LABEL=SWAP-hdb3         swap                 swap    defaults        0 0
/dev/hda5vol/LogVol01   swap                 swap    defaults        0 0

Jim