[SuSE 8.2] Adding a distro
 

I presently have WinXP and Suse 8.2 on my computer and want to add another distro, probably RedHat. How do I do that without messing up my existing os'es. I presently boot with Grub in mbr and choose from there. I would like to keep it that way with RH added to it, however I don't mind changing it to the RH equivalent.
I presently have four partitions: one for Win one for Lin and two empty. Can I add RH to the existing Suse partition or is that a bad idea and is it preferrable to install it on a seperate partition. Any tips/ideas much appreciated.

Don't add Red Hat to an existing SUSE partition - Red Hat will need its own ROOT PARTITION.

Ther first thing to do is make sure youve got some completely free space at the end of your drive for Red HAT to go on.

You could choose not to install a bootloader from Red Hat and then when you re-boot you could configure SUSE's Grub.conf to find the Red Hat installation.

This is just one way of doing it.

Thanks, will give it a try.

Right, taking the plunge and getting stuck even before getting wet. The distro of choice is Mandrake 9.2 Beta. For starters, the DrakeDude seems to have a day at the opera and isn't working, so switching to text. That works. Already having windows and suse on the box, which I want to preserve, I need to do things manually, sort of. First off, choose partition. I have the windows one and the suse one and the swap and then there's hda 6, 7 and 8 (i believe) to choose from. I think I picked 8. But then, it wants to have a mounting point or something like that. I haven't the foggiest what it is let alone where he needs to put it!. The suggestion given is something like: windows/C------ (maybe it's G------, kind of hard to distinguish). So, what on earth is he going on about? I read of course 3 days worth of howto's and readme's on partitioning, managing partitions, mini-faq's aso, none of which tells me anything even remotely useful on just this matter. All help, tips and ideas will be greatly appreciated.

Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeelp.

You need to select one of those blank partitions and set its mount point to /

Then you could set your OS's partitions to mount points like /windows/C and /mnt/SuSE

Thanks Sorrodos, I got the DiskDude to work which made life slightly easier. However, right at the end of the installation it complained about a writer RPM in an error window. I could click ok in the window but the same window would reappear. No backwards, no forwards, no nothing. Only way to get out with ctrl,alt, backstep or whatever it's called. To make things worse, it had decided, all by itself, to do some refurbishing in the MBR. (I wanted it to make a bootdisk which turned out to be useless). So I've had my fair share of Mandrake for some time to come I think. Any way to get the old MBR back? Fixmbr in windows didn't do the trick. Grateful for any help/ideas.

Yeah, Windows won't detect any non-Microsoft OS's on a hard drive, so it will only make entries for those in the MBR. Its a cute little trick Microsoft pulls.

Your first distro was SuSE, right? Take a look at this site...
http://sdb.suse.de/en/sdb/html/dstark_rescue.html
It describes how to use your install CD as a rescue disk. You should be able to correct the MBR that way. Try to get into X, use YaST, and edit the bootloader option, hopefully theres an option to rewrite the MBR in there. If not, try typing Grub in a terminal window. Let me know how it goes.

Thanks, Sorrodos. I did ask Mandrake to make a floppy, but it won't let me boot either into Suse or Mandrake, only Windows!
I did check the Suse link but have major problems understanding what it is they are trying to tell me. I sort of understand they want me to make a floppy, but it is totally unclear what I will be able to do with that floppy. Copying system files from a sick system to a floppy somehow doesn't seem like a very good idea to me. What I could do is start rescue and then write grub. I then get into grub (I believe) but then what?

Exactly, use the rescue mode, thats what I meant to tell you to try, sorry I wasn't too clear about that.

So yeah, put your boot CD in, tell the BIOS to boot off that CD, and enter rescue mode like it tells you on that SuSE site I sent you. When you get booted up, you will need to tell grub to install back to the mbr. I have been told that if you type grub at the console, it brings up a program that lets you configure grub. One option in it should be to install it back to the mbr. Check out this thread I started a few days ago.

Hope this helps :) Let me know how it goes.