Dual booting Linux
 

I've just installed Debian 3.0 on my 40gb hd and currently have Win XP Pro and Slackware 8.0 installed. Since I've installed Debian, I had it put lilo in the mbr so I guess it overwrote Slack's lilo file and now I have to boot slack with the floppy disk. Debian picked up Winxp(ntfs) and a windata(fat32) partition but didn't pick up Slackware's partition.

What I need to know is how do I add Slack's lilo info to Debian's lilo file to have the choice of booting Debian or Slackware.

Do I need to get into Slack and tell it to put lilo in Slack's /root partition and then modify Debian's lilo to add it's info?

Thnx.

you need to syncronize the /boot folders and cp the slack kernel to /vmlinuz on debian, or you could setup slack to use /boot to store the kernel instead of using /

this way no matter which distro you are in running lilo will not screw things up


How to do it

mount one system on the other in a folder and copy the /boot files of one to the other for each distro, also if you leave slacks kernel in / copy it to / of other distros

if you have different files with the same name you can rename them and adjust lilo.conf

you only need one boot.b so that won't be a problem

Thnx for the reply...let me get this straight. Well, I kinda messed up cause I don't have a separate /boot partition. I should have made one but I had slack installed for quite awhile now.

So you say I should mount slack's partition to Debians, which I have done before. Then copy all of Slack's /boot files to Debian's /boot folder? Then copy Slacks kernel to debian's kernel folder=root?

Then I add slack's info to debian's lilo file?

Thnx again.

I just never tried dual booting different versions of linux before!

This is my partition layout:

/dev/hda1=winxp
/dev/hda5=slack
/dev/hda6=swap
/dev/hda7=windata
/dev/hda8=debian

yes, you also need to copy debians files to slacks /boot folder
and setup slacks lilo.conf
then you can also run lilo from slack

Thnx for the help...I'm go give it a shot when I get home.

One more question. Is it possible to move Slack's & Debian's /boot files to a separate /boot partition without major problems/issues?

sure, no problem

the only time they are used are at boot.
just copy both systems /boot/files somewhere, then if you have a free partition for them just mount it someplace and put them on it. then add the partition to fstab to mount on /boot

just make sure you have a boot folder to mount it on for both systems


/dev/md0 /boot ext3 defaults 1 2


the last two numbers are the fdisk order you can use what you want there

be careful when changing partitions around, reboot your system to sync the kernel partition table with the filesystem before doing other stuff.