Partitions
 

I've read a lot of post about partitions but for some reason it still doesnt work they way I want.
I've two disk and want to use the second 40 gig drive for SuSE and Mandrake. I made the the following partitions:

1. Primary 750 mb linux swap
2. Primary 18 gig linux ext3
3. Primary 18 gig linux ext3

I want to use the installers of the distros to set up te rest of the partitions in one of the large ones I already made. Is a good start and will it work? I tried before in a similar way and that time Suse (second install) worked fine but mandrake didn't boot even with floppy boot. Somehow the distros mixed up the partitions made by the installer.
Does it mather which distro I install first? Does one of them 'see' the other and places it auto in Lilo?

Regards

You don;t create partitions in partitions you create partitions in free space. Just delete all your partitions and During the first install Create swap and 18GB worth of partitions for that distr. Then when you install the second distro just install it to the free space.

It doesnt matter which order you install them in - if LILO doesnt automatically create an entry for the other distro, its usually a simple matter to add an appropriate entry in lilo.conf for the other distro - re-post if you have any problems later with LILO.

Well lilo is giving me headaches. I started with Mandrake which went fine. After that I installed SuSE but it replaced the bootloader with Grub. I tried to configure Grub to load mandrake (standard was vmlinuz-enterprise) from a print I made of the liloconfig file. Nothing worked. It couldn't find the image.
I reinstalled Lilo with the Mandrake installer cd and now the problem is reversed. I cant configure Lilo to boot SuSE, I get all kinds of errors and it stops booting.
The root of Mandrake is on hdb1 and the root of SuSE is on hdb3. I guess it can't find the right SuSE kernel if I use the Mandrake Lilo boot and vise versa. How can I fix this?
(I'm now back on Mandrake with Lilo bootloader)
In Mandrake the partitions look like this:
hdb1: ext3 / 5.8 gb
hdb5: swap 498 mb
hdb6: ext3 /home 12 gb

hdb3: doesn't show any other partitions (should be there, SuSE made them during installation) ReiserFS 18 GB

Regards

Is the SUSE kernel on /dev/hdb3 in the boot directory of that partition or is it in some separate SUSE boot partition?

Eh, lets see. I installed SuSE after Mandrake and just let it organize it's own space on the second half of the 40 gig disk. So I guess SuSE placed it in the boot dir but I'm not sure what a standard SuSE install does partition wise.

Well....... if the SUSE kernel is in the boot directory of the SUSE root partition on /dev/hdb3 then :

Boot into Mandrake - create a mount point for the SUSE root partition

Open console

su
root password

mkdir /mnt/suse

then mount the SUSE root partition

mount -t ext3 -o rw /dev/hdb3 /mnt/suse

use whatever filesystem youve used

then open lilo.conf

kedit /etc/lilo.conf

Put an appropriate entry in for SUSE - something like

image=/mnt/suse/boot/vmlinuz
label="suse"
root=/dev/hdb3
append="devfs=mount hdc=ide-scsi acpi=off quiet"
read-only

You might not need my append line etc

remember the image line needs that extra /mnt/suse at the front because of the mounted nature of the SUSE root partition

Then save lilo.conf and as rot user again

/sbin/lilo

Get an error at /sbin/lilo no such file or directory. I did make the dir so I guess I have to do something else as well?

Twink - make sure you mount /dev/hdb3 first to the mount point first before editing lilo.conf - ive just put the edit in the last post - if youve used reiserFS make sure you put it in the filesystem field instead of my example ext3

Thanx for speedy answers! Well seems to have a new problem. The SuSE partition is ReiserFS and wenn I try to mount /dev/hdb3 it gives: fs type ReiserFS not supported by kernel. Perhaps that explains why I cant see any other partitions in diskdrake aswell.

Never thought that this was going to be the hardest part ;)

Can you use ext3 for SUSE?

No need to! I used ReiserFS instead of reiserfs in the command...stupid...I'll try again and see if it will work this time

Well it seems to work now. I'll go for the reboot and let you know what happend....

Hmm, close but still no boot.

Loading suse
Bios date check successful
Uncompressing Linux.....Ok, booting the kernel
kmod: failed to exec /sbin/modprobe -s -k scsi_hostadapter errno is 2
kernel panic: VFS: unable to mount root fs on 03.43

Any clues left?

Can you post your lilo.conf file from Mandrake with everything in it including the new SUSE entry?