Dual Boot Redhat & Gentoo

Hey all. I'm a little confused on how I would go about installing Gentoo on my existing Redhat machine. I just aquired a 30Gb hard drive which I have installed as a slave drive. My disks look like this:

/dev/hda1 is the boot partition
/dev/hda2 is the root partition for the redhat system
/dev/hda3 is the swap partition

Now I have a few questions about installing Gentoo on the second disk(/dev/hdb). Gentoo can use /dev/hda3 as its swapspace as long as its setup correctly in /etc/fstab right? What about the boot partition? During the Gentoo install I'll have to mount the boot partition. Will Gentoo blast away my existing boot configuration for RedHat? What is the best way to go about sharing the /boot partition?

Why would you want to share the /boot partition? I would think it easier to have each install have it's own /boot partition, and then you can manually edit lilo (or grub) to point to each of the installs. Yes you can share the same partition for swap space.

slight

Good question. In my current /etc/fstab file I have the /boot partition set to:

LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2

Now as I understand it, with this setup linux will automatically search for the /boot partition and mount it to /boot. If I have two /boot partition it complains and does not know which one to use. Are you suggesting that I define the location of the boot partition like:

/dev/hda1 /boot ext3 defaults 1 2

and for the gentoo /etc/fstab do:

/dev/hdb1 /boot ext3 defaults 1 2

Would this stop linux from complaining about two /boot partitions?

That is what I am thinking. I don't believe it would cause any problems proided your lilo.conf is made properly. I had slack 9 and RH on the same machine a while back, both on the same HD, and everything was fine. You don't even have to make the /boot folder a seperate partition if you don't want to, and I don't think that there is anything in /boot that you would want to share between installs anyway.

slight

Well I'm using grub as my bootloader but I'm pretty sure you can just set the boot partition manually in /etc/fstab as apposed to doing the LABEL=/boot thing. Now the current grub.conf file looks like this:

default=0
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title Red Hat Linux (2.4.20-20.9)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.20-20.9 ro root=LABEL=/ hdc=ide-scsi
initrd /initrd-2.4.20-20.9.img

After installing gentoo I would just add something like this:

title Gentoo
root (hd1,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-whatever-kernel ro root=LABEL=/ hdc=ide-scsi
initrd /initrd-whatever

I think I get it now although I'm still a little confused with this whole LABEL=/ thing.