LS

I never made a dualboot with linux-dsitro's, but i like to try, 'couse i want to give Suse 9.0 a go. But on the other hand how should i do it without wrecking my RH 9.0 sys. I already kicked out Bill (MS XP).

Greetings and thanx,

Marcel van der Reijken

Just like you installed RH with Win XP, go on and install SUSE in the same system. Only, choose a fresh install, and select the partitions where you install....

Pretty easy, if you ask me....

The best way is to add another harddrive. Otherwise, you can try to use parted. Parted will resize ext2/ext3 partitions, but cannot move the starting cylinder. What does your partition table look like now?

If you have a significant amount of room on your /home partition then I would backup everything in /home, then use fdisk to delete it and reappropriate the space.

Thanx for the quick response both

I still got some questions:
1) what do you mean by "Only, choose a fresh install.."
2) should i define a second swap
3) how about the boot loader?

Partition now:
swap 1500 mb
root 10 gig
home 20 gig
I already reserved about 30 gig free space

Choosing the fresh install means that you must not choose the upgrade option etc...

You need not define a second swap. any number of distros can share a same swap.

Just continue using the boot loader you use now. If SUSE recognizes your RH9, and adds it to its choice of OS's, then there is no problem in using SUSE's loader. Otherwise, you have to take a back-up of your current one, and then add it to the SUSE's options.

Please be sure that you dont chose the Reiserfs filesystem for SuSE.

Why shouldn't i use Reiserfs, and what instead?

You can use anything like ext3, ext2. Why i recommend not using reiserfs is that i tried it once. I had redhat and many other linux flavors. I chose riserfs and i did not use the SuSE bootloader. So, the problem was that i could not boot SuSE and RedHat(i was using the RH loader)

So, I formatted SuSE and reinstalled as ext3 and now all runs well.

Both RedHat and SUSE support reiserFS. In fact, reiserFS is the best file system I've known! I have RH and FreeBSD, and I also have reiserFS in my system. It is the file system of the future, so I think you must use it.

And, linuxlala, I can't exactly get your problem. What was it?

OK friends,

I took all your advise, and still made a mess of it.
1) Next to my RH 9.0 i installed Suse 9.0.
2) Suse recognized indeed that their was a native linux version on de hd0 present.
3) Things Suse saw were:
Linux native hda1 /boot
Linux native hda2 /usr
Linux native hda3 /
Linux native hda4 / (unused)
Linux native hda5 /swap

4) So I installed Suse on the unused space on the disk and made hda6 in Ext3
5) No remarks
6) Used GRUB like on RH
7) Then i rebooted, and only saw linux / floppy / failsafe
8) Of course linux was Suse
9) I tried in Yast to reach out to my RH, but in vane (probably due to my knowledge)
10) Then i ran back to RH by rebooting with the installation CD
11) Of course after rebooting the MBR was back to "normal" and Suse was nowhere insight

I don't like to screw up my RH, but i'm love to play with Suse - looks cool, and it is still on the HD.
So what should i do? Can i make Suse reachable via RH? Or so?

Any wisdom is very welcome

Marcel van der Reijken

Just copy your entries in GRUB from one installation into another. For example, copy the entries from SUSE's grub into RedHat's as another option.

If you can't boot into SUSE, try this....

Mount your SUSE boot partition in RedHat. Look for the grub.conf under /etc and see what entries are there. Copy that into RedHat's /etc/grub.conf

I don't see any problem in this. If any do arise, post.............

OK i went for a search for my partitions in RH.
1) With "fdisk -l" i couldn't find any; propably the wrong place
2) With /etc/fstab i found:

"[root@*** etc]# cat fstab
LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1
LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
LABEL=/usr /usr ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/hda5 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom udf,iso9660 user,unhide,noauto,o wner,kudzu,ro 0 0
/dev/cdrom1 /mnt/cdrom1 udf,iso9660 user,unhide,noauto,o wner,kudzu,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0"

Maybe still the worng place. If not were or what is my Suse partition en how should i mount it know?

greetings.

You are looking at /etc/fstab. Look at /etc/grub.conf. It is the bootloader configuration file which tells Linux about your / and the other partitions on your hard disc.

If I understand correctly, your Red Hat is hda3 and SuSE is hda6. So, now do from Red Hat as the root user

mount /dev/hda6 /mnt/cdrom
cd /mnt/cdrom
less etc/grub.conf (This is the grub.conf file of SuSE). Copy the output and put it into /etc/grub.conf of your Red Hat.

That should solve the problem.

The problem i faced with Reiserfs was this: I already had RH9 installed. I installed SuSE as reiserfs. No problem. I mention SuSE in the boot loader of RH9 and here was the big problem. I got KERNEL PANIC when I tried to boot RH9 and SuSE. So, I had to ultimately reinstall SuSE. I could though boot the other 4 OS's on the same hard disc. Am I making any sense?

Yes LinuxLala, you make perfect sense. I tried to install Suse with Ext3. So then after rebooting - see post 10 - no RH boot possibility.
My question now is (1) where to find my Suse grub.conf so that i can copy it to my RH grub.conf; (2) or is this the wrong way around? If it isn't (3) where can i find my hda6 partiotion?

OK, i let my questions rest and followed your advice:
After:
"mount /dev/hda6 /mnt/cdrom
cd /mnt/cdrom
less etc/grub.conf"

i found:
"root (hd0,5)
install --stage2=/boot/grub/stage2 /boot/grub/stage1 d (hd0) /boot/grub/stage2
0x8000 (hd0,5)/boot/grub/menu.lst
quit
END"

Is did it? Is did enough to get it rollin'?

Greeting
Lynxgogo

Yes, i believe this is your SuSE grub.conf file. Tell me, you can now boot into RH with the RH GRUB? You have answered your own questions and YES this much is enough to get you to boot SuSE

1. "mount /dev/hda6 /mnt/cdrom
cd /mnt/cdrom
less etc/grub.conf" This is the way to access your grub.conf in SuSE from Red Hat.

2. No this is not the wrong way.

3. You can actually make an entry into /etc/fstab regarding your SuSE partition. Just add
/dev/hda6 / defaults 1 1

Now, go to /mnt(cd /mnt) and create a directory suse as
mkdir suse.

Now you can access your suse by typing
mount /mnt/suse

as opposed to mount /dev/hda6 /mnt/cdrom.

You can do this if you want or you can continue to mount SuSE as
mount /dev/hda6 /mnt.cdrom.

It is your choice.