[ubuntu-in] Dual Booting K/Ubuntu's

Ramnarayan.K ramnarayan.k at gmail.com
Mon May 4 18:09:36 BST 2009


Hi

Finally some sucess

On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 12:16 PM, Onkar Shinde <onkarshinde at gmail.com> wrote:
> You don't need to put the second grub on separate partition. You can
> safely overwrite the first grub installation.
>
Tried this but then the second Linux OS disappears (rather its boot details)

> If you still want to put second grub on separate partition then put it
> on partition that contains '/' of second installation.

So this is what it did
First installed 8.10 which has a separate /boot /root and /home
Then installed 7.10 in which there is only one partition /root - which
includes its /boot however during the *installation* 7.10 asked me
install bootloader - to which i said yes. However instead of allowing
the default hd0 as the boot loader address i installed to hd0,7 which
was the 7.10 /root partition (more on this later)

So i rebooted and ofcourse 7.10 did not appear - but my 8.10 was
alright - logged it and found the /boot/grub/menu.lst of 7.10 and
picked up its main booting lines and inserted them as they were into
the grub of 8.10. *Voila* now i can see all my 3 boot option (8.10,
7.10 and wince xp) , it also means i can choose to install many more
distros , as long as i have enough space on my HD.

 **
The biggest problem i had was trying to figure out how my partition were mapped
mean my hd appears as sda but the boot loader identifies my hd as hd0
. Further each partition has a different hd0 x number
like
sda1 = hd0, 0
sda2 = hd0, 1
etc

once this got figure out it was easy to redirect installation of
bootloader to the appropriate hd0
 I used the following help site
http://users.bigpond.net.au/hermanzone/p15.htm#A_Quick_Guide_to_Grubs_Numbering_System

hope more people find this useful, since it makes multibooting Linux
OS's quite quite easy

ram



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