(Sorry Bob, first version did only go to you and bounced) On Sat, 2007-09-08 at 00:49 -0400, Bob S wrote:
Hello SuSE people,
This is especially for you guys/gals that run 3or 4 os's on a big hard drive. How do you handle the primary and extended partitions? Other people already answered so I skip some redundant answers.
Is the /home as safe residing in the extended partition? you can have it wherever you like but you need to be careful with what you do in regards to usage of it. For example, say that you boot 10.2, mount /home, login as user bob and start up misc programs like kde/gnome/mailer etc. That creates lots of new files in /home/bob Well, 10.3 is out so lets try it, you install it, use same /home and login as bob. Your old desktop is now migrated to latest version. You reboot back to 10.2 and suddenly your email/IM/xchat/whatever doesn't work because it's config files where changed for the newer version and the old version gets confused/bails out. My way of handling that is that I have different users and copy around data so I only migrate to newer versions and never back.
How do you manage to run 3 or 4 os variants on just 4 primary partitions? Remember that it's only M$ win that requires primary partition and everything will be much easier
Love to hear your individual strategies.
Besides what the other posts said I didn't see anyone with a setup similar to mine. I'm using 3 disk (was using 5 for a while, 3 ide & 2 sata) and at my peak I had MS Win, opensuse 10.0, 10.1, suse desktop beta and 2 versions Mandrake installed. You could do something like: disk1p1 M$ Win disk1p2 /boot # 200Mb common boot for everyone disk1p3 swap # swap common to everyone disk1p5 / # everyday Linux 1 (one you can fall back to) disk1p6 / # everyday Linux 2 (one you plan to move to) disk1p8 LVM disk2p1 LVM disk3p1 LVM LVM: collection of all partitions marked LVM (=all disks become one huge virtual disk) homelv # common home dir for all installs (see note above) datalv # common data like install packages, mp3, movies etc NLDlv # root partition for NLD testing SLESlv # root partition for SLES testing fclv # root partition for fedora testing I normally don't put the root partition on LVM because it makes it harder to recover (hard to get to single user mode when the lvm needs fixing) but with multiple OS installed you can always boot some other os to fix it. I love lvm since it's so flexible, if you for example run low in space in datalv you can just expand it without playing around with disk partitions (=much safer) and you can even add a new disk and expand it without problem. If I need to replace a disk with a bigger one/remove one I can use a single "pvmove /dev/hdb" to move data around and get it done without tons of repartition and fs moves. One thing is that since /boot and /boot/grub/menu.lst is common for all installs you need to manually manage that area. I found that each os version have there own version numbering like vmlinuz-2.6.18.8-0.5-default/initrd-2.6.18.8-0.5-default so there is no conflict but they normally replace /boot/grub/menu.lst so I make sure I have a copy of menu.lst somewhere and then I manually merge the old and new menu.lst after each install.
Anxiously awaiting the final 10.3 so I can try Compiz-Fusion, Beryl whatever and be able to fall back to 10.2 when I screw it up. I'm also waiting for 10.3 final but you can do as me and start playing with Beta 3 to get a feel for it and report problems (or you may have to report same problem on the final because everyone assumed someone else already tested and reported it)
Bob S.
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