Advice on Partitions for Multiboot

Felix Miata mrmazda at ij.net
Sun Jun 4 04:20:14 UTC 2006


I have 17 functional puters. Most have multiboot with at least 1 DOS
and/or windoze, 1 or more OS/2, and up to 6 Linux.

I always put a small ext2 on xda3 and/or xda5 for /boot for whichever
Linux / I install on xda7 (xda6 is swap). Additional Linux each get grub
installed to their respective / partitions. I never put grub on the MBR.
When I want to use Grub as the boot manager, I make the xda3 /boot
partition the active partition, which allows any standard MBR code to be
able to start Grub. If some doze action messes with the active
partition, any number of WinDOS tools can easily reset the active
partition back to xda3.

The /boot partition can easily chainload any other partition just by
adding another entry to /boot/grub/menu.lst. There's no need to foul
/boot with additional kernels or foreign distro installer mistakes.

Most of the time when I want to add a distro to a system that already
has at least one, I capture its installation kernel and initrd from the
source ftp or iso and copy it to /boot, add an installation entry to
/boot/grub/menu.lst, and start the install from there, usually an FTP
install.

URL below has more.
-- 
"All have sinned & fall short of the glory of God." Romans 3:23 NIV

 Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409

Felix Miata  ***  http://mrmazda.no-ip.com/partitioningindex.html




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