Hi

Can anyone explain how I can install two distros on one machine?

I have win98 and Suse 9.2 with the latter being used the most. I have been using Suse since 6.4 but after an experience with RPM's and innumerable dependency problems I want to try a Debian distro. I made space on the drive and installed ProMepis. It installed Grub in the MBR and over wrote the Suse 9.2 login. It trashed the Suse initrd files with the result that I had to spend a day reinstalling Suse. Either option of Update or Repair would not work.

I was loathe to try it again so I bought and installed a second drive onto which I have installed Promepis including GRUB etc. Despite adding the relevant ProMepis menu.lst item to the Suse Grub login it will not load but defaults back to Suse. I have even tried a boot floppy but that will not work either.

If I watch the Suse install sequence the second drive is seen as HDB with three partitions / as HDB1; swap as HDB2 and /Home as HDB3. However once Suse finishes loading the file manager does not show the 2nd drive nor does KDiskfree. If I enter the partition designation into fstab I am informed this is a "bad entry".

My needs are quite simple. At the Suse login (preferable but not essential) I would like to be able to chose either Win98, Suse or Promepis.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

grabro

hehe. Strange problems.

This how you should fix it.

The common problems at installing two distros are sharing partitions. You can share the swap partiiton but that's it. You can not share /boot or /root partitions as the files will get overwritten and that is not, what you want to do. You can also share a /home partition if you have one, and you should if you ahve two distros, because it will make your life much easier. Also, when you reinstall, you can keep the home partition unformated and can so keep the data on it. Anyway, to touch your problem.

You have to decide which GRUB will you load. As I see it, you only need one GRUB. You can use SUSEs or MEPIS's grub to load the three OS's. This is how you should do it. First choose one of the GRUBs you will be using. I will presume you use the SUSE's GRUB and write it to your MBR with the command (run in SUSE): /sbin/grub-install /dev/hda

This command will install GRUB files in the MBR of the first harddisk (being the WINdows and SUSE harddisk). Then you should edit the /boot/grub/grub.conf (again using SUSE to avoid confusion) file to ensure that an entry for the MEPIS distro is in it. You can copy those lines from the auto generated grub.conf found in MEPIS (copy the file somewhere (windows partition is not a bad spot) to have it with you as you edit the SUSE grub.conf file).

This should present you with a GRUB prompt with three OS's and an ability to choose from them.

As for fstab: POST IT here, so we can see what's wrong. HArd to say, I'd just be guessing this way.