Installing 3 distro's on same drive.

[Johan Scheepers]

On 19/04/2011 22:39, Doug wrote:
> On 04/19/2011 02:21 PM, Lucio M Nicolosi wrote:
>> On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 11:55 AM, Johan Scheepers
>> <johansche at telkomsa.net>  wrote:
>>> Good day,
>>>
>>> If I intend to install 3 distro's on one drive, but would like to 
>>> find out
>>> if it is possible / feasible ?
>>>
>>> Make 4 partitions on drive.
>>>
>>> Should they be all primary. I understand linux can handle that?
>>>
>>> For instance..
>>>
>>> First partition..        Ubuntu
>>> second partition..    Fedora
>>> third partition..        Centos
>>> fourth partition..      Swap.
>>>
>>> Now..should I install them in that sequence then Centos would 
>>> control the
>>> MBR ?
>>>
>>> So now what happens when ..  say I replace  any of the first 2 with
>>> another/later distro ?
>>>
>>> What can be done should the MBR go bad to boot the distro'S.
>>>
>>> Some advice will be appreciated
>>> Thanks
>>> Johan S
>> Perhaps a Grub dedicated partition would do, just like:
>>
>> http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/grub/grubpartition.htm
> I have XP plus 4 Linux distros on one drive on this machine (Dell laptop)
> that I'm writing to you on.  XP is on sda1, pclos on sda5 and 7, and the
> others on higher order partitions, all of them after XP, as you can see
> from the numbers, are extended.  The grub booter from pclos controls
> everything.  (The Ubuntu booter doesn't work right for multiple 
> partitions:
> it tends to put in a separate boot line for each partition, not for 
> each /.
> Also, it's ugly, it's not GUI.)  I only know about the pclos booter, 
> which
> works nicely; you could try one of the others that you want to load and
> see how it works.  You can only have four primary partitions, but quite
> a few extended on one primary. sda5 and so on are on the 2nd primary.
> (Windows likes a primary--I don't know how it would take to an
> extended. It also likes to be first.)
>
> [doug at localhost ~]$ df -h
> Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on         OS
> /dev/sda5              12G  3.9G  7.4G  35% /                        
>      pclos
> /dev/sda7              11G  574M   10G   6% /home                   pclos
> /dev/sda9              33G  176M   32G   1% /media/disk           Debian
> /dev/sda8              28G  5.5G   21G  21% /media/disk-1        Debian
> /dev/sda13             46G  3.1G   41G   8% /media/disk-2        MINT
> /dev/sda11             33G  2.8G   29G   9% /media/disk-3        Ubuntu
> /dev/sda10             20G  4.6G   15G  25% /media/disk-4       XP
> /dev/sda1              31G   20G   11G  64% /media/disk-5        Ubuntu
>
> --doug
>
Thanks Doug,
Windows xp drive is not in my laptop but in my desk drawer.
I am looking at the responses so far.
Will decide what to do in a few days.
Regards
Johan S