AW: Re: ext3 Filessyten in FC5-Test incompatible with other FC or RHEL versions

[Jim Cornette]

gsc.news at online.de wrote:
>>If I recall, there was a change in the ext2 utilities from FC3 to FC4 
>>which fsils with earlier distro created partitions.
>>
>>I believe you need to disable filechecking with the entries in your 
>>fstab  file. That is, change the last two digits in your older distros 
>>to zero.
>>Alternatively, you could mount the other OS partitions whenever you need 
>>to access the files on the common partitions..
>>
>>Are you talking about a common /home partition?
> 
> 
> Yes, and therefore, I can't use my privous installations anymore.
> And I have no idea, how to convert the ext3 back.
> 
> I have read already bug #174618, but they assume a kernel patch for
> FC4. But as I want to use Centos4 and don't believe RedHat will corporate
> such a patch into their Kernels.
> 

I like the seperate partitions for /boot for each installation. Another 
good idea is to chainload the different installations and installing 
grub in each distros boot partiton. In that way, you do not have to be 
concerned about installations butting heads with each other.

With using one /boot partition between several installations, the 
boot/grub directory is probably a mangled mess with each installation 
overwriting the other distributions files.

I am surprises a common /boot partition scheme even works.

The issue with preventing file checking with older distributions and 
newer distributions being mixed on the same system, caused a person to 
be dropped to the maintenence shell when an ext3 partition was mounted. 
I cannot recall which way the problem went, older to newer or newer to 
older.
Since you did not mention FC4, I assumed you were effected by the 
problem which was due to incompatibility between FC3 and FC4. A /home 
partition which was common between distros would have dropped you to 
maintenence with the problem that I was thinking of.

Regarding recovering your partitions, Unless you formatted the 
partitions, you should have the same makeup for them. /boot/grub is 
probably a mess though. All I see is that you might have to make a boot 
partition for each distribution. You might need to deal with this on the 
fedora forum or the Centos list or in documentation for the details on 
seperate /boot partitions, using /boot off of the / partition and other 
schemes.

Jim