Triple Booting

[Crunchy(Cracked)Butter]

I want to triple boot with WinME SuSE and RedHat on my laptop, anybody has a preference or an ideal way of installing these 3, of course i know windows has to go first but what then?

[pkd_lives]

I suppose it comes down to which boot loader you want, and whose looks best. Obviously you are going to use a RH Grub or the one used by Suse.

I really doesn't matter.

Create a boot part. of 100MB
Create you home, you will be able to share this all round - But remember that if you create EXACTLY the same user names on a shared Home then KDE and GNOME setups will have some strangeness going on.

create you first root and swap. Install a distro.

Then install a second distro.

Do not re-format Home or boot. Swap is shared with all distros.

Create a new root for your next distro. Make boot disks.

[Ice-9]

Which version of SuSE do you plan to use?
If it's 8.0 I would go with Red Hat as last install, I've had some freaky experiences with SuSE's Lilo in the past, whereas Mandrake and RH gave me no probs at all (with the bootloader that is).
Since SuSE 8.1 uses Grub as default I don't know if there's any improvement over 8.0 with Lilo.

[Crunchy(Cracked)Butter]

My SuSE version is 8.1 and its uses grub as far as i know.

What i was thinking was creating 3 partitions on the laptop, 10GB for windows, 5GB for SuSE and 5GB for RH all using Fdisk. This not a good idea first?

If i am to create a shared home then i'm gonna need an idiot proof guide to tell me.

Can i do all this with Fdisk, create home and boot?

[DC]

quote:Originally posted by Linux Frank:
I suppose it comes down to which boot loader you want, and whose looks best. Obviously you are going to use a RH Grub or the one used by Suse.

I really doesn't matter.

Create a boot part. of 100MB
Create you home, you will be able to share this all round - But remember that if you create EXACTLY the same user names on a shared Home then KDE and GNOME setups will have some strangeness going on.

create you first root and swap. Install a distro.

Then install a second distro.

Do not re-format Home or boot. Swap is shared with all distros.

Create a new root for your next distro. Make boot disks.

Actually, using the same account name is no problem, using the same home directory is.
<OT>
Makes me think - if directory /foo is owned by user AJ, with uid 2, and the partition containing directory /foo is mounted by another system, where Miranda has pid 2, is the directory then effectively owned by Miranda or is it protected otherwise?
</OT>

Anyway,  share /home and /boot, and if you want some other directories used by all distros make a partition for those too. Swap should of course be shared. /, /usr, /var, /etc, /bin, /sbin, dev and all those are best kept apart, they'll probably conflict, and are sure to cause confusion. Do remeber though that /tmp should be sharable.

I'd do a 4/4/8/4 split (or something close), with 4 for Win. 4 for secondary distro, 8 for primary distro, and 4 for shared disks (between the distros - fat disks are hell). But that's just me ofcourse. Those parts could be sub-divided in partitions.

Win should be installed first. Fdisk can be used for creating partitions after that, if you want.
I'd put /boot on a primary partition, as well as windows. The rest can be put on logical drives on an extended partition (with 1 primary partition to spare. Use it for a / if you want to).

[Crunchy(Cracked)Butter]

Okay i've installed Redhat all byitself only because windows burped and died on me while i was at college, all i did was change my preference from single to double click!  Now it won't even boot.  Anyway i got everything off the drive via SuSE.  

Now everything is wiped from the drive and RH is installed, infact i am posting now with it.  The ony problem with this installation so far is the sound doesn't work, no biggy but i'm hoping somebody will help me on this?

Anyway, this installation was just a test to see if everything worked.  Back onto the topic at hand.

People who have posted with helpful suggestions i thank you, however the suggestions have gone over my head so i'm going to play with FDisk and seperate my HDD into 3 drives instead.  10GB for win and 5GB each for both linuxes.  These swap partitions you guys talk about is making me scared in doing anything, anyway can i do this or is this what you guys mean?

Drive 1/windows
Drive 2/linux swap (768MB Shared) /dev/hda3 (i think)
Drive 3/boot partition (SuSE) /dev/hda1 (i think)
Drive 4/root (SuSE) /dev/hda2 (i think)
Drive 5/boot partition (Redhat) /dev/hdb1 (i think)
Drive 6/root (Redhat) /dev/hdb2 (i think)

If i have got this wrong then please tell me.

[voidmain]

Do not use the Microsoft FDISK to create the Linux partition. Just install Windows but make sure your Windows partition is small enough so you have room for the other distros. Then use the partitioning software in the installation process of the other distros, again leaving enough unpartitioned space for the next one.

You do want a swap partition but it can be shared by both Linux installations, no need for a separate one for each. The size depends on your RAM. Here is what I would recommend depending on how much RAM you have:

128MB - 256MB swap
256MB - 256MB or 512MB swap
512MB - 512MB swap

You will also create this during the installation of the the other OSs. As far as the boot loader goes you should also be able to use the same /boot partition for each distro as well (just don't select "format" when it comes to the "/boot" partition on the second Linux install). So your partition table would be something like this:

/dev/hda1 - VFAT/Windows - However big you want
/dev/hda2 - /boot ext3 - ~75MB
/dev/hda3 - swap swap  - See note above
/dev/hda4 - / for Linux 1 ext3 - However much you want to give it
/dev/hda5 - / for Linux 2 ext3 - However much you want to give it.

This *should* work.

You should end up with two kernels in your /boot, you may have to add an entry in the boot menu for the first kernel/distro after installing the second distro. In fact after installing the first distro and before installing the second distro make a copy of your "grob.conf" or "lilo.conf" depending on which boot loader you are using. You can use the info from that after installing the second distro if you need it.

[ November 28, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]

[Crunchy(Cracked)Butter]

Okay i will check it out and try it.  RH did allow me to boot other OS'es if needed and there was a menu in which to select them.

I take it i create all these partitions with the first installation and then with the second installation (with RH) i can just select the empty space i created yes?

[voidmain]

Well the only way you "create" open space is by deleting partitions. You don't want to do that. You just want to do a normal installation but don't do an "automatic partitioning" setup. Do a manual partitioning setup with "Disk Druid" (in RedHat).

Set up your partitions manually with Disk Druid, two of them will already be created (/boot and swap) so you only have to selecte those. Use "/boot" as the mount point on the existing "/boot" partition that you created in Mandrake but do not format it. Use the SWAP partition that you created in Mandrake as the SWAP partition in RedHat by selecting it in Disk Druid. The only partition you should have to create at this point since it is your last OS is the "/" partition with the remaining free space.  I hope I have explained this well enough, maybe not.

Don't spend a lot of time configuring anything on any of the OSs until you are sure you have all three of them booting the way you want. Then configure to your hearts content.

[ November 29, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]

[Crunchy(Cracked)Butter]

Okay this is what i have done.

installed windows and SuSE. and it looks like this:

Hard Drives
\/       MountPoint|Type|Format|Size(MB)|Start|End

/dev/hda1|          vfat|         9782|    1|    1247
/dev/hda2|          swap|   yes|    737|    1248| 1341|
/dev/hda3|          reiserfs|     4299|    1342| 1889|
/dev/hda4|          EXTENDED|     4259|    1890| 2432|
/dev/hda5| /boot|    ext3|   yes|    102|    1890| 1902
/dev/hda6| /|        ext3|   yes|   4142|    1903| 2430

I will install RH on hda6.

Thing is, how would i boot SuSE?  it doesn't have a /boot as you can see, the ones in bold is what i created with RH.  I'm thinking Suse's boot is with hda4 but i don't know.  Anybody explain?  I'm gonna need to leave the laptop as it is until i am totally sure.

After the partition screen there is the option to boot other Oses, only windows was detected, i manually selected Suse to try it and would i correct if i selected hda3 since there doesn't seem to be another boot point?

[ November 29, 2002: Message edited by: Crunchy(Cracked)Butter ]

[ November 29, 2002: Message edited by: Crunchy(Cracked)Butter ]

[voidmain]

Well you should have been able to create a /boot partition in SuSe just as you have in RedHat. Not to worry though. All you should have to do is copy your SuSe kernel to the RedHat /boot partition and copy SuSe's GRUB kernel section into a GRUB entry in RedHat. No sweat. Create a directory called "/suse" in RedHat, then mount the SuSe partition (/dev/hda3) on that directory (mount /dev/hda3 /suse). Copy the SuSe kernel over from /suse/boot to /boot and add the GRUB entry using info you find in SuSe's GRUB config file.

[ November 29, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]

[Crunchy(Cracked)Butter]

SuSE uses Grub like RH.

I'll install RH first then get more info on this copy kernel thingy.

But it is safe to install anyway yes?

[voidmain]

Once you install RedHat you will probably lose the ability to boot into SuSe until you copy the kernel over and add it to your RedHat GRUB menu. Reread my last note as I was changing it while you were entering your last note.

[Crunchy(Cracked)Butter]

RH is installed along with SuSE and windows.

Problem is, from within RH i cannot see SuSE or windows partitions.  It sees its own only. But going to the hardware browser RH can see them and see them only, i cannot access said drives.

What do i do?

[voidmain]

Did you mount the partitions from the other OSs?

[ November 29, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]