Hi to all @ LQ!!
Could someone please help me out with the multiple booting up for FC3 and Mandrake!!
I know that there is way to do it, but i havent got much information how to edit the GRUB.

What i have done now is..
I have installed FC3 in one of the Partitions. I have installed mandrake and when it came to writing the boot loader to MBR ( i guess thats the right term), i skipped the process so that it wouldnt over write the FC3 boot loader.
Now i haven't got a clear idea of how to edit the GRUB file in the FC3 so that it will allow to boot Mandrake to boot up.

this is the print of my fdisk
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdb1 * 1 13 104391 83 Linux
/dev/hdb2 14 1288 10241437+ 83 Linux
/dev/hdb3 1289 1364 610470 82 Linux swap
/dev/hdb4 1365 2630 10169145 5 Extended
/dev/hdb5 1365 2630 10169113+ 83 Linux

this is a 80GB HD. I dont know wich (/hdb4 or /hdb5) that i installed Mandrake

My FC3 grub.conf looks like this
default=0
timeout=5
splashimage=(hd1,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenue
title Fedora Core (2.6.9-1.667)
root (hd1,0)
Kernal /vmlinuz-2.6.9-1.667 ro root=LABEL=/rhgb quiet
initrd /initrd-2.6.9-1.667.img
title Windows XP Proff
rootnoverify (hd0,2)
chainloader +1

Is this way of partitioning it alright?

I cant wait for the time that i could really see all done perfectly....
But too much of reading from the net has left me @ a certain level of understanding. But i am not really clear what to do.

Please Help!!
Thank you for all the time and effort guys...
Regards,
Azzath.

looks pretty ok to me. One could argue that a seperate partition for /home would've been nice, but no killer.

/hdb5

... perhaps a parallel might explain this better: you have a cake (/hda) that you can slice into 4 pieces (only). However, you can choose to have the fourth piece be special (extended); if you do, you can slice that into more pieces (here, you `slice' it into one piece: /hdb5), and you must slice it into pieces (even only one) to eat (put data on) it.
omg. I should write night-time stories for children

I'm no grub wizard, but I'd think that copying the `bootable-thing'-specific parts for fc3 and changing them to match those for mdk should work.

If you mount the partition upon which you installed Mandrake, while you're running FC3, and open /boot/grub/menu.lst on the Mandrake partition, you could just copy out the relevant "stanza" and paste it into /boot/grub/menu.lst (which is a symlink to /boot/grub/grub.conf in FC3) on your FC3 partition.

The stanza will look very similar to the one that boots FC3. For example, here's the stanza in my "menu.lst" that boots Debian Kanotix. Note the similarities:

# For booting Kanotix
title Kanotix (Bug Hunter X Fix 2)
root (hd1,0)
kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/hdb1 vga=791 ro
boot

(Mandrake's may or may not have the "root" line, may or may not have an "initrd" line, and may or may not have "boot" -- just copy whatever stanza's there.)

The other thing you'll want to add is something like this:

# By default, boot the first entry
default 0

# Fallback to the third entry
fallback 2

GRUB starts counting at zero, so "default 0" means "boot the first entry," and "fallback 2" means "if you can't boot the first entry, try booting the third entry." Modify to suit your needs. Put whichever one you want to boot by default before the others.