Adivce on Partitions

[Thiers Botelho]

On 6/3/06, Gary W. Swearingen <garys at opusnet.com> wrote:

> "Thiers Botelho" <thiersb at gmail.com> writes:
>
> > On 6/2/06, Andy Anderson <opus at slowlanecafe.com> wrote:
> >> >
> >> > One single /boot for both Ubuntu's ?
> >
> > [snip]
> >
> >> So to answer your question, yes, a single /boot for all OSes.  I let the
> >> installer
> >> for the latest Ubuntu release install it's version of Grub into the MBR,
> >
> > Since you have Windoze as well, I'd think the best place for Grub
> > would be /boot and not the MBR. At least that was the prevalent
> > recommendation a while ago on Fedora site and lists.
>
> A single /boot sounds like a recipe for disaster.  And using "/boot"
> as a counterpart to "MBR" is confusing (or confused).  The Grub
> bootloader is installed in a boot sector (plus a few following ones),
> either the MBR or the boot sector of a partition (often a partition
> which has a /boot, but not necessarily).  You can have the Grub
> bootloader installed in one partition (must be a primary partition,
> AFAIK) and config it to boot OSes from several OSes, each with it's
> own /boot.  Of course you configure the grub bootloader to read from
> only one /boot/grub/* when you run "/sbin/grub".  I suppose that that
> grub dir could even be cut loose from any extant OS so it doesn't get
> clobbered by upgrades, etc.

It seems that if one asks 100 different people about multi-boot setups
you'll end up collecting 100 "slightly" different recipes.

I have little experience in this myself. I once made a Win2K + Fedora
1 setup which actually worked, IIRC I had GAG on the MBR pointing to
Grub on /boot . But that was one single Linux, not two. Two or more
Linux distros together are still theory for me. I intend to have a
chance to put this in practice "real soon now", but for the moment I'm
just collecting other people's experience and trying to build a plan
on top of that.

Speaking of which, I've bookmarked an interesting Howto on this
subject (a bit outdated), which might serve for future reference
together with your hints and Andy's. It's at

http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20040614#2

The author speaks of multiple cascading bootloaders (item 6), which is
a different approach from yours.

Cheers

Thiers