Triple boot with two linuxes

gr8geezer · 01-09-2003, 07:17 PM

I've managed to do double boots (linux & XP) using LILO a few times as it's a piece of cake.

Whenever I've had a second Linux distro on the same harddisk as the first though I've had the problem of having to use a boot floppy to access the second / older distro. Seeing as Linux is quite mature in the booting area though it seems awfully odd to me that I couldn't boot two distros straight from LILO (or maybe GRUB).

Has anyone here got a straightforward method to accomplish this? Thanks.

born4linux · 01-09-2003, 08:40 PM

u can make the two linux systesm share the same /boot and swap partitions. Don't install a boot loader for the second linux install. After installing, you need to manuall add the entry for the second linux to the boot loader config file of the first linux install.

jetblackz · 01-10-2003, 12:05 AM

http://jetblackz.freeservers.com/Con...tiBooting.html

I could add as many OSes to my boot menu as the screen space allows. Let NT bootloader do the magic.

bulliver · 01-10-2003, 05:40 AM

What I do is install grub only with my main distro (redhat) and copy the kernels for the other distros (currentlt LFS and ArchLinux, but always changing) in my redhat boot partition, and in grub.conf, point the kernels to their proper partition. Not sure if this is the "correct" way to do it but it works fine.

Here's how I do it:

Code:

# grub.conf
title Red Hat Linux (2.4.18-14)
        root (hd0,0)
        kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.18-14 ro root=LABEL=/ hdd=ide-scsi
        initrd /initrd-2.4.18-14.img
title linux from scratch (2.4.20)
        root (hd0,0)
        kernel /linuxbot ro root=/dev/hda6
title Archlinux (2.4.20)
        root (hd0,0)
        kernel /archkernel ro root=/dev/hda7