On 07/23/2010 07:09 PM, Felix Miata wrote:
On 2010/07/23 19:55 (GMT-0500) Jim Flanagan composed:
I have an existing 11.2 install with separate /boot, swap, /, /home, and /var partitions. I'd like to keep this setup, at least for now. I have room on the same disk, but am unsure how to do a new install of 11.3.
What I THINK I need is: Set /boot to the existing partition
Setting one partition as /boot in more than one installed OS is an invitation for pain. Each OS will assume that partition is its duty to maintain. You'll likely find mkinitrd programs building initrds for kernels that were not installed by that OS, with quite unpredictable results. I've never found good reason to try this myself.
< -snip- > I've been doing it a bit differently. I want to be able to do a full install of a new OS while maintaining the option of booting back to the old one if/when things go sour. So I create two boot partitions formatted with ext2 (because I'm used to it), one swap partition, two root partitions and a /home partition. It looks like this for a first-time install: /dev/sda1 ext2 100MB /boot /dev/sda2 ext2 100MB unmounted /dev/sda3 swap RAM size swap /dev/sda4 extended partition, rest of disk /dev/sda5 xfs 40GB / /dev/sda6 xfs 40GB unmounted /dev/sda7 xfs rest of disk /home I use the default MBR for booting. It does use a bit of disk space, but it's worth the sacrifice, IMHO. When it becomes time to install a new OS I use the custom partition creation option to use the unused /boot and / partitions, leaving the originals as unmounted. Everything works as expected without messing with grub or mkinitrd. Grub allows selection of either OS when booting. Subsequent OS installs just flip/flop back and forth, with the /home partition just trailing along for the ride. If there's some config information that needs to be moved, the non-active root can be manually mounted on /mnt to copy /etc/passwd and whatnot to the new OS. I'm sure there are other methods, but this has been working well for me since SuSE 5.3 and as recently as this afternoon when I bumped up to 11.3 from 11.2 on one system. Regards, Lew -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org