How to dual boot mdk10 & mdk2006 with lilo?
 

Hi,

I want to install mdk2006 on my machine that currently runs mdk10.1. Since I want to fine tune the new install first before removing the old one I want to be able to create a dual boot (mdk10/mdk2006 & with shared home-dirs).

The install of mdk2006 went fine but Lilo does not properly boots the new install. The old one keeps running fine, nevertheless.

How can this be done via lilo?

Tha, Ronald

Ronald,

It's been some time since I multi-booted more than one distro - hence my reply is rather general (vague ?).

I seem to recall having to make sure exactly which files I was using to get into the original installed distro and too know where those files were.

So that when the new distro version was installed, I could just copy and modify the bootloader entry so that it pointed to the correct place for the new install versions.

Though it may also depend on how you have your partitions set up.

Because I seem to recall that it was somewhat confusing, untill I'd changed my partitioning set up to have seperate /boot, /, and /home partitions (obviously there would be the /swap as well).

this enabled me to have copies of the boot files (kernel version/vmlinuz and initrd) seperately in the /boot partition.

You would then need to have a seperate / (root) partition for each of the installed distro versions (I believe that you can have as many as you want - within reason, as I understand that there are some limitations, but I don't understand what they are, 2 or 3 different distros is, as I understand it, entirely feasible).

the 2 distros I multi-booted were Mandrake and Debian - my confusion was increased by wanting to be able to look into both distros from each other, so that I could compare one from the other.

In the end, I just kept it so that I had just the /boot, /swap, / and /home partitions (I've not go a windows/linux dual boot anymore). This meant that if I wanted to try a different distro, I just had to tell the installer to format the / and /boot partitions with the new distro/files - then as long as I only install the same software packages - all the icons/shortcuts etc in my /home seem to work fine (they seem to change the actual packages via upgrades/updates, but not usually the actual command thats used to start the application/package). I DO NOT (under any circumstances) do anything to my /home - that way, I don't loose any files/data/address books. Yes, you may have to re-install any customisations that you like, they are usually living in the / partition somewhere, and you would have overwritten them with the new distro versions.

Sorry I can't be more specific.

regards

John

p.s. Oh and don't forget, that if you make any changes to the lilo.conf (which I seem to recall is at /etc/lilo.conf), before you reboot (after the changes) you need to run /sbin/lilo as root to "apply" any changes.

Thanks john,

that at least helped me to understand how lilo works.

Ronald