Can you have like 2 OS on one partition like Mandrake and Red Hat and share the same partition

I was wandering that becase i want to set asside about 12 gigs for linux but i want to run Mandrake and something like Red Hat

I'm going to jump out on a limb here and say no you can't do that.
You can make another partition and install the other distro.

Correct Me If I'm Wrong Please

Darn....ok thanks

I second rmartine's extreme opinion... hehe
but no, i dont think its possible or at least its not very sane.
Rather split the 12gigs up for two different Flavour of Linux. 6gigs each is quite a lot of space to mess around with.


Anyway, Good luck...
Let us know if u dared to try installing two linux flavours onto one partition, I would really like to know the outcome.


Nemesis(ZA)

You couldn't install two different distros on one partition by definition, because (I'm almost 100% sure) that a partition can only be mounted as one filesystem, eg as /
Even if you made directories such as /mdk and /rh I think you'd have to hack every package to make every program work in the correct fake root directory instead of the real root directory.
I really doubt you could mount something like /dev/hda5 as / and then /mdk as /

Just cut the big partition in two.

You can copy each install's kernel images etc into each's /boot directory to make configuring your boot loader slightly easier, if you find it too hard to add /mnt/hda6/boot instead of /boot for a few entries

it doesn't make sense to be able to instal two on one partition, you can do that with somethign like windows98 and windows NT as they use different directories for their main systems. but how do you expect two distro's to work on a single partition? it's bad enouch only having one partition in the first place for one distro, you should always divide it between multiple partitions.

you can easily repartition that 12gb slot into a number fo other ones and install it no problem.

I'm generally thinking that you're not too sure what you mean by that though, try telling us what you actually want to accomplish. sharing data between the two is certainly no problem at all. but as programs are stored at the same place, how do you ish them to be different from one another?