I am using fedora 8 on my acer laptop.
I wish to try out fedora 9 . During instln - in the grub screen it detects only the win xp instln and fedora 9 there are no options for fedora 8 ?!?! while fedora 8 is installed on the system.
I didnot go any further and aborted instln - just in case I loose my existing instln of fedora 8.
Any idea how to get fedora 9 to run on the same machine which has fedora 8 installed ?
thanks in advance
nishith

It should work fine, but you may have to do a manual partitioning (or disk layout/whatever the installer calls it).

You will need F9 on it's own partition though

actually i have created the seperae /boot , swap and the / partitions for fedora9.
However, the problem lies in the fact that during instln on the boot loader screen, there is only winXP displayed. Fedora 8 is already installed and it doesnot show up on the grub menu . So I stopped the instln of fedora 9 just in case I spoil my fedora 8 working install
any clues on that......thanks

nishith

You could install grub on the F9 partition and chainload from whichever bootloader you are using now.

If you only want to try F9, I'd install it without putting grub on the mbr, (install it in / or /boot) then you can modify F8 grub to boot F9.

Um, isn't that what I said?

Fedora doesn't detect other Linux OS's generally and you need to manually edit your grub.conf file. Do the install, re-boot to Fedora 8, create mount point for Fedora 9, mount it and go to the F9 /boot/grub/grub.conf to get your vmlinuz and initrd entries and put them in the F8 grub.conf.

I have F8 and F9 setup on my system and have been keeping two versions since FC6 and F7. The reason I originally did this was to allow for a smooth transition between releases. I had done a great deal of customizing on FC6 and wanted to transition that over to F7. While it is always possible to do an upgrade, I feel this method provides a greater safety net since I know I can quickly go back to a working release or review old configuration files. I also keep notes of what I change between releases so I can get the new release up and running with a similar configuration in a very short time.

I setup my partitions, labels and filesystems as follows.
sda1, /boot, /boot - boot partition for F9
sda2, /, / - root partition for F9
sda3, /boot8, /boot - boot partition for F8
sda4, Extended
sda5, /8, / - root partition for F8
sda6, swap, - used by both F8 and F9
sda7, /diskless, /diskless - partition for diskless PC
sda8, /common, /common - common data area used by both

/home is on each root partition. I kept this separate because desktop configuration files may be different between versions of a particular application.

Grub is installed in the MBR and grub configuration is kept in /boot on sda1. Grub is not installed in /boot8. The kernel files for each release are kept in their respective boot partitions. When kernel updates arrive it is necessary to manually update the grub configuration for F8, while F9 updates automatically. It may be possible to put the kernels for both releases in the same boot partition, but I prefer to keep them separated. You can probably do without boot partitions all together. Guess this is a hold over from the old days on my part. This setup has worked quite well for me and I'm sure there are plenty of other ways to do it.