On 6/4/05, Claude Jones <> wrote: > I have a dual-boot box with XP on my primary drive and FC3 on the second; I > would like to add one, and perhaps two additional distros. I have been > researching multi-boot but keep turning up pages that are really old. Is this > something that is simple to explain for one of you, or can someone point me > to a more up to date howto? I'm thinking of adding FC4 and perhaps Mepis on > the box. > -- > Claude Jones > Bluemont, VA, USA Hi Claude, It's fairly straight-forward. Oliver gave you a good overview, but here is a little more detail. You'll need free hard disk space or empty partitions to install to; you cannot install it on the same partition like you can with Windows. You can either add a drive or use some exisiting partitions that you aren't using (if you have any). If you need to repartition a drive, that's a little more complicated. Once you have that figured out, you can just install the new distro to that partition (or partitions, however you care to do it). Tell it to leave the others alone. When you come to installing the boot-loader, install it to the boot partition instead of the MBR of the disk. We'll let the FC3 GRUB chainload to the other distros, just like it does with Windows (or pick your favorite to be primary, you'll just have to reinstall FC3 GRUB to its boot partition then). This will let each distro manage its own boot-loader. Then just add entries to the FC3 /etc/grub.conf like: title Fedora Core 4 rootnoverify (hd1,3) chainloader +1 The (hd1,3) should be changed to match the disk and partition where FC4 is installed. You can do the same thing with Mepis or whatever else. A note on sharing partitions. You can share a swap partition with no worries as long as you don't use suspend to disk in one of the linux distros (this probably doesn't work anyway). You can share some data partitions, and if you use different usernames, you can share the home partition (if you have a multiple partition scheme). If you use the same username you could run into issues with config files. For instance, FC4 uses Gnome 2.10, while FC3 has 2.8 so something could have changed, or different distros may have different options for some programs. It might work okay, but it's probably easier not to have to deal with it. You can always mount the other root partitions so you can access data from the other distros. I don't know of any good howtos for this, but if you have any questions or run into any problems, just let us know. Jonathan
