Hi guys. I`m currently running mandrake 9.2 which is working great. What i would like to do is buy the powerpack edition of 10.0 or maybe wait for 10.1 i don`t know. But instead of wiping 9.2 and replacing it, i thought it would be a better idea to dual boot with the powerpack..

Now the question is, is there anything special i have to do or can i just simply make some free space at the end of the drive ( it`s 80 gig) and install the powerpack there. And will it automatically add itself to the bootscreen so that i have a choice between the two.

Thanks

you need to pick one as the main one that will install lilo. When I did this recently I changed the lilo on my 9.2 to install in the root of the boot or / partition or the 9.2 install rather than the MBR, and I made the space for 10. Then I installed 10 and it added 9.2 to the lilo entry of mdk 10 which I installed in the mbr... Maybe make mkrescue disk or cd to be safe so you can boot if stuff goes wrong.

Hope that is clear... It's 1am here and i'm tired

Thanks for the reply amosf.

OK, is it possible to put lilo on the root partition of 10.0 when i install it, and then boot into 9.2 and add 10.0 to the lilo entry of 9.2?

And I take it that there will be no issues with 10 installing beside 9.2 in as much as it will install itself without me having to provide already setup, formatted and renamed partitions.
I ask this because there is already a "/" partition and a "/home" partition. Will 10.0 make it`s own renamed partitions or will i have to do it in diskdrake prior to the install?

Thanks again for the reply

I have 9.2 and now 10.0, and have been booting two installs of Mandrake off the same drive for a few years now (! ). I had already partitioned them for this, and I have:
hdb1: /
hdb5: /
hdb6: swap
hdb7: /usr
hdb8: /usr

and there's no problem with adding lilo entries for each other. The only thing is to remember if you're in one install the mount paths to the other's kernel images is different than in the other install looking back, eg:

Booting 9.2 with hdb5 and / and hdb8 as /usr, my paths for 10.0 are /mnt/hdb1/boot, but in 10.0 with hdb1 as / and hdb7 as /usr the path to 9.2's kernel is /mnt/hdb5/boot.

Hope that helps a bit

Yes it does help, thankyou very much.

I notice that you have 2 partitions as "/" and 2 partitions as "/usr"

I take it that you obviously can have two partitions with the same name, and what defines them is one is prefixed with hdb1 and the other hdb5 , or whatever the number is

So i just have to make some free space by shrinking my existing partitions and making two more partitions , one being / and the other in my case being /home (just to get this clear it will mean that i will have two root partitions both called / and two home partitions both called /home ) And then i can go ahead and install 10.0 on the newly created partitions... Have I got this right?

Thanks

The partitions are really always called hd**, and a booted system can only have one / root mount point upon which to mount/attach the rest of the system. So when I boot my 9.2 install, the hd** which is mounted as root is hdb5, and the hd**s which are the / and /usr of my 10.0 install are mounted at /mnt/hd**.

Your situation: Yes you'd cut some new partitions from the end of your drive, and linux will call them hd** (maybe hda7 and hda8). These can be mounted in your current 9.2 install as /mnt/hd** if you wish, or at any directory in your system. When you install 10.0 on them and boot it, they'll be the / and /home partitions of that running systems, and you can conversly mount the 9.2 ones as /mnt/92 and /mnt/92/home (reforming their heirarchy) or /mnt/home (/mnt/92/home would then be an empty folder/mountpoint), whatever you want.

10.0 when being installed will detect your 9.2 install (choose not to upgrade it) and add it to your lilo.conf so you can boot back into it. You can also edit your 9.2's lilo.conf and add the 10.0 entries incase you run lilo -v when booted in 9.2 and dont want to loose 10.0 as a boot option.

If you're confused just ask.

That`s great, thanks for your replies Proud i really do appreciate them

Just a couple more questions for clarity.

1) 9.2`s bootloader is installed in the MBR. should i do this with 10.0 when it asks me or put it somewhere else?

2)For my purposes i have always let mandrake decide how large and how many partitions i should have and it works well for me . If i go into 9.2 and just resize the partitions to give me the space i need for 10.0, when i go to install 10.0 .Will everything be just like you said in your previous post except that 10.0 will divide and format the free space into the required partitions itself with no dramas?

3) So really by the sound of it , it is as easy as just creating some free space, installing 10.0 on it, and then when i boot back up i will have the choice of which operating system to boot into. Is that correct (you see i already dual boot with win 98 and that was no problem, i just thought i heard somewhere that it was slightly more difficult to do when you wanted to dualboot 2 linux systems, something about having to edit the lilo.conf file before being able to boot into the old version of linux)

4)How are you finding 10.0?

Just don`t want to hurt 9.2 as we use it for everything (don`t even use 98 so i will probably get rid of it in the process) But i would really like to be able to get the latest system every now and then to test out and things like that so as to try and contribute to the community. Thats why i want to BUY the powerpack, basically to support Mandrake for providing an excellent system that i really do get a lot of benefit out of.

Thanks again for your really informative replies

cheers

1)&3) Yep let 10.0 put its Lilo in the MBR. It should add Windows and your 9.2 install automatically, and once you boot 10.0 you can compare its /etc/lilo.conf with you 9.2 one and add new entries with corrected paths if you want (eg /mnt/hd**/boot/kernel-2.4.22-custom). Or boot 9.2 and add the 10.0 entries before reinstalling that version of lilo with lilo -v.

2) How exactly are you planning to free this space in your drive so you can make it a partition?
What is your current setup? Eg. Mine's:

First drive with Win98SE split over 3 partitions.
hda1 /mnt/win_c in linux, C: when in Windows
hda5 /mnt/win_e in linux, E: when in Windows
hda6 /mnt/win_f in linux, F: when in Windows

Not related: My second drive appeared as D: when new before I formatted it as ext3 partitions and windows couldnt see it. This caused problems with moving drive letters as it bumped my previous D: to E: and E: to F:, so I use Letter Assigner to force the letters so the gap remains.

Second drive as stated, two linux installs sharing a swap partition, each with seperate / and /usr.
hdb1: / when in 9.2, /mnt/hdb1 when in 10.0
hdb5: / when in 10.0, /mnt/hdb1 when in 9.2
hdb6: swap
hdb7: /usr when in 9.2, /mnt/hdb7 when in 10.0
hdb8: /usr when in 10.0, /mnt/hdb8 when in 9.2

I dont think you can use the Mandrake Control Center to resize the partitions, and am not sure if you can use the 10.0 installer to safely resize the 9.2 partitions without formatting them. Maybe start a seperate thread to ask about that, or search a bit. I havent changed my partition scheme in over a year.

4) I had to move from my everyday use 9.2 install to this 10.0 so I could use my ADSL USB modem, and I've not fully clones all my fav tweaks and changes to the configuration to suite my tastes (mostly gui stuff), but it seems fine. The newer KDE is again a few nice improvements, nothings's not working. I havent tried playing or burning CDs actually (been online a lot in my free time )

I've purchased 9.0 and 9.2 PowerPacks, and used the download edition for 9.1 and 10.0 Official, and also like to keep one fully working install and then mess with another, be it a new release or playing with Apache2+PHP or whatever. I really think you'll continue to like Mandrake, but obviously want to be sure you wont risk your nicely set up system to try 10.0, so just check that out first, mkay.

OK, I`m planning to free the space up with Diskdrake which is in the MCC. It will delete partitions, resize partitions, create partitions and format partitions. No problem.

My current setup is (using an 80 gig western digital HD)

hda1 /mnt/win_c in linux, C:when in windows
hda5 /mnt/win_d in linux, D: when in windows
hda6 /
hda7 /swap
hda8 /home

There are two windows partitions as you can see. The D drive is very small as this is the one i resized when installing mandrake. I don`t think it is used (at least I havn`t knowingly used it) The computer came like that when i bought it, I believe it is because win98se can`t handle one large 80gig drive with one partition so they made two equal sized ones and installed 98 on both. (not sure if this is true, it`s just what i heard)

As I`ve said in a previous post i don`t (or virtually never) use windows, so it wouldn`t matter if i got rid of it completely, but since i have a large drive there is no need for me to get rid of it and it can`t really hurt to keep it there so i probably will. I certainly only need the one of them though,so i will delete the D partition. I will then shrink the C partition down to about 5 gig and this is where i would install the new mandrake( being 10.0 or 10.1 if i decide to wait until then)

Thanks once again Proud, your info sure has been helpful.