Setting up for dual boot FC1 and another distro

slackist · 06-02-2004, 04:10 AM

Currently I have FC1, and I want to dual boot with another Linux distro.

After searching I found this thread:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ting+two+linux

which is similar to what I want to do, except I don't need the WinXP option.

So, following from that I think I should shrink my / partition to make space for the new distros /, but I can share the /boot and swap partitions between both.

Is there a non destructive way to shrink the / partition? And what name should I give the new space or is it allocated automatically?

For the name I figured I perhaps just use /dev/hda5 or whatever was not being used, but if I do

Code:

[root@localhost root]# ls /dev/hda*
/dev/hda    /dev/hda13  /dev/hda18  /dev/hda22  /dev/hda27  /dev/hda31  /dev/hda7
/dev/hda1   /dev/hda14  /dev/hda19  /dev/hda23  /dev/hda28  /dev/hda32  /dev/hda8
/dev/hda10  /dev/hda15  /dev/hda2   /dev/hda24  /dev/hda29  /dev/hda4   /dev/hda9
/dev/hda11  /dev/hda16  /dev/hda20  /dev/hda25  /dev/hda3   /dev/hda5
/dev/hda12  /dev/hda17  /dev/hda21  /dev/hda26  /dev/hda30  /dev/hda6

it seems that I already have /dev/hda0-32 in use

Still 2 steps forward and one step back for this

Thanks to all for any suggestions

mark

jmorse · 06-02-2004, 09:32 AM

About resizing ext2 partitions see 'http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2resize/'

You can't do it on a mounted partition, so you may need to find a distro which can do this on its own, or build a boot floppy/cd.

The files in /dev/ represent the computer hardware, if you do 'cat /dev/hda32' I would be suprised if it responds with anything other than 'No such device or address', you don't have 32 disk partitions, althougth the file that represents it [should it ever exist] is in place.

Instead run 'fdisk -l /dev/hda' to get a list of partitions on your first ide drive.

/boot and swap partitions can be shared...

Partitions are not named, they are mounted under a directory. You may want to mount the new distros root partition under '/mnt/different_flavour'.