On Fri, 23 Jul 2010 22:22:09 -0700
Lew Wolfgang
On 07/23/2010 08:46 PM, Felix Miata wrote:
On 2010/07/23 19:51 (GMT-0700) Lew Wolfgang composed:
Felix Miata wrote:
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.
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.
You have me confused. Did I write something that made you think I ever do a full new install without having previous ready to fall back to? Unless my HD is rather new and I've not yet had the time to do more than one install, most of my disks have a whole bunch of previous installs to fall back to.
No, you didn't, Felix. I was just offering the way I've done it for years just using the default install boot settings and having multiple physical boot partitions.
e.g.: http://fm.no-ip.com/Tmp/Dfsee/big31L04.txt (3 Linux, plus other; 2 HD, MD RAID1) http://fm.no-ip.com/Tmp/Dfsee/gx260L0c.txt (14 Linux, plus other; 1 HD) http://fm.no-ip.com/Tmp/Dfsee/m7ncdL0e.txt (13 Linux, plus other; 1 HD) http://fm.no-ip.com/Tmp/Dfsee/t2240L08.txt (9 Linux, plus other; 1 HD) http://fm.no-ip.com/Tmp/Dfsee/gx150L05.txt (13 Linux, plus other; 2 HD)
No HDs above have more than one partition that is ever mounted as /boot. Most never mount any partition on /boot. All Linux are bootable.
I use the default MBR for booting.
Grub on MBR in conjuction with non-Linux OS installations is an invitation to need to perform a boot loader repair from other than HD media. c.f. http://old-en.opensuse.org/Bugs/grub#How_does_a_PC_boot_.2F_How_can_I_set_up... & http://fm.no-ip.com/PC/install-doz-after.html
I agree, I only install Linux. Any Windows installs go on a VM in my case.
Regards, Lew
And just to muddy the waters even further, here's my setup. Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda11 29G 7.7G 20G 29% /-SUSE /dev/sda10 31G 6.4G 24.6G 21% /-Fedora /dev/sda5 342M 42M 283M 13% /boot <<<<< common part. unmounted /dev/sda12 7.7G 1.1G 6.3G 15% /opt /dev/sda13 218G 1.9G 205G 1% /Common <<<<< common data part. /dev/sda2 15G 167M 15G 2% /Shared-Win /dev/sda1 40G 31G 8.6G 79% /Windoze_7 /dev/sda7 20G 8.1G 11G 43% /downloads /dev/sda8 9.9G 151M 9.2G 2% /source /dev/sda9 49G 2.1G 44G 5% /temp /dev/sda3 32G 0G 32G 0% to be BSD I keep /home directories separate to avoid user setting interactions between different program versions but share the data between all distros. Just be sure when creating user accounts to use the same UID between distros, in my case, since openSUSE was installed first and had quite a few files as 1000, users, I had to create a new user by the same name in Fedora and set the UIG & GID to 1000, users. Then created a script to create symlinks from home to the users data directories as below. #! /bin/bash ## create symlinks from /home/tom to /Common rm /home/tom/.claws-mail l ln -s /Common/.claws-mail /home/tom/.claws-mail rm /home/tom/Document ln -s /Common/Documents /home/tom/Documents rm /home/tom/bin ln -s /Common/bin /home/tom/bin rm /home/tom/Pictures ln -s /Common/Pictures /home/tom/Pictures rm /home/tom/Mail ln -s /Common/Mail /home/tom/Mail rm /home/tom/Maildir ln -s /Common/Maildir /home/tom/Maildir rm /home/tom/Music ln -s /Common/Music /home/tom/Music rm /home/tom/Podcasts ln -s /Common/Podcasts /home/tom/Podcasts rm /home/tom/Public ln -s /Common/Public /home/tom/Public rm /home/tom/Templates ln -s /Common/Templates /home/tom/Templates rm /home/tom/Videos ln -s /Common/Videos /home/tom/Videos exit 0 Of course if your starting from the first distro, change the "rm"s above into "mv". This allows me to have all my mail, documents, etc. shared between the distros. Tom -- Tom Taylor - retired penguin openSuSE 11.3 x86_64 Fedora 13 KDE 4.4.4 rel 2, FF 3.6.6 claws-mail 3.7.6 registered linux user 263467 linxt-At-comcast-DoT-net -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org