3 os on the same PC
 

All,

I have XP and Red Hat 9.0 already installed on my PC.
I would like to install Mandrake 9.2 on the same PC and be able to choose on which OS I want to boot with Grub.
Are there any specific points I have to take care about? Can I share some partitions (for example the /boot) ?
Thanks in advance for your help,
Vincent

i'm not sure i would share /boot, but i guess if you took the right precautions you could. sounds like more trouble than it's worth to me, however. i would definitely share /swap, and possibly /home. i definitely wouldn't share /etc or the rest of the system directories -- /usr, lib, /var, etc. maybe you can share some of those safely, i don't know, i'm just saying i wouldn't do it. :D

I go for the easy share swap and install each distro completely to it's own root.
I vary from this with server or real multi user configurations.

2damncommon, synaptical,

I have in fact installed the 2 distros separately, without sharing any partition. I stil can run Windows and the last installed Linux (Mandrake) but can not run the Red Hat anymore (it was the second os installed and the first Linux).
It looks that the MBR has been overwritten but partition are still there (I can still read them via ext2fs on windows) and that everything related to my Red Hat partition has been overwritten.
I still have the grub.conf (from Red Hat). How do I have to update the menu.lst in Mandrake in order to be able to boot also on Red Hat.
Thanks in advance for your help,
Regards,
Vincent

You just need to reference the Redhat partition in grub.conf or menu.lst.

The entry is something like:

title "whatever you want to have appear on the menu"
root "where grub finds /boot/grub, so make it the same as the mandrake entry"
kernel "where grub can find the Redhat kernel. Paste in the line from the redhat version of grub.conf"

I seem to recall that Redhat might have had an additional line for the kernel info, but I don't have that with Slackware. If there is another line, just paste it into the new grub.conf/menu.lst.

I did this when migrating my box from Redhat to Slackware, so it should work. In my case, I added Slack to Redhat's grub, rebooted to Slack, re-installed grub from Slack and changed the MBR, added Redhat to Slack's grub setup, cleanup my files etc. and then removed Redhat and its grub entries.

Hope this helps... :)