Please help! Double booting Mandrake and Slack

Accordion · 03-28-2004, 03:08 PM

I've been using mandrake 9.1 for a few months now, and decided to try slackware too. Problem is, they don't seem to like sharing the same hard drive. I re-installed mandrake and put the boot loader into the first section of the drive, and then installed slackware and put the boot loader in the root partition (hda7), but I can't choose which distro I want to run. Mandrake boots when I restart the computer, but it doesn't have the graphical interface any more, just a logon prompt

. I can get into slackware by booting from the cd, but I'd like lilo to give me a choice of distros. Is that possible? Thanks!

Andrew Benton · 03-28-2004, 04:57 PM

I was in the same position as you a few months ago and in my experience it is not possible to boot two different linux distros with lilo. What you need to do is boot into Mandrake, open the mandrake control centre and change the bootloader to grub. Agree to whatever options it offers you and then when it's all done open /boot/grub/menu.lst in a text editor (kate or gedit) and add an entry something like this

Code:

title Slack
root (hd0,8)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda9 vga=788

see the way I've got slack on hda9 but grub sees it as (hd0,8)? If it was on hdb4 grub would see that as (hd1,3), always 1 less than you're used to counting. You have to specify root=/wherever it's mounted so the kernel knows where to boot.

JohnKFT · 03-28-2004, 05:38 PM

I triple boot Mandrake 9.1, Windows XP and Slack 9.1. I use the Mandrake /etc/lilo.conf and have no /etc/lilo.conf in Slackware. When the computer boots I get a graphical login allowing me to choose XP, MDK, Slack ,floppy etc. Slack is the default. Here is my Mandrake /etc/lilo.conf:

boot=/dev/hda
map=/boot/map
vga=normal
default="Slackware"
keytable=/boot/uk.klt
prompt
nowarn
timeout=100
message=/boot/message
menu-scheme=wb:bw:wb:bw
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label="Mandrake"
root=/dev/hda6
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append="devfs=mount acpi=off"
read-only
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label="Failsafe"
root=/dev/hda6
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append="failsafe devfs=nomount acpi=off"
read-only
other=/dev/hda1
label="Windows"
table=/dev/hda
other=/dev/fd0
label="Floppy"
unsafe
image=/mnt/sk/boot/vmlinuz
label="Slackware"
root=/dev/hda9
append="acpi=off"
vga=normal
read-only

I had mandrake installed first so it already had the working lilo.conf, which I altered to accommodate Slack. Presumably your partition numbers may be different, but hopefully this will help you.

I have my Slackware installation mounted in Mandrake at /mnt/sk and my Mandrake mounted in Slack at /mnt/mdk (each noted in the respective /etc/fstab), which enables me to easily access each from the other, and to do this multi-boot business. Beware, however, I do not really know what I am doing - this was a mixture of research, logical deduction and trial and error. Anyway, it works perfectly for me. Good luck

PS - most important that you have no bootloader for Slack.