I'm currently running Red Hat 9 and winXP, I have a Red Hat GRUB bootloader thhat came with th Red Hat distro. When I boot up it asks me what OS I want. If I remove the Red Hat and go for Fedora core 3 or whatever else, can I still keep the same bootloader?

I know you can enter in some sort of "bash-like editing" at the bootloader but I don't know the details.

Yes you can. Grub is the default bootloader for Red Hat/ Fedora. Even if it wasn't, you could still use it. If you put the Fedora Core 3 CD in and boot, it will give you the option of upgrading your RH9 into FC3. Before doing that I'd backup your /boot/grub/menu.lst, just incase the upgrade screws it up. The backup will have the data like what drive and partition XP is on, so you'll be able to boot both.

If all goes well the upgrade will take and grub will keep your dual boot. If it screws up, you'll temoporarily lose the ability to boot into XP, but simply putting the XP data back into the menu.lst file will restore the ability to get into it. Another good backup solution would be to make an XP boot disk.

Peace,
JimBass

So say I wanted something that didn't use grub as default bootloader, maybe Debian. Will it have an option during setup to replave the old Red Hat option at boot with a Debian option? or can I configure the bootloader seperately?

Both.


Personally I like Lilo (Debian's bootloader) better than Grub, so I stayed with Lilo.

All 6 OSs listed to the left are installed on this one PC. I have several Lilo & Grub versions at the ready, but kept only the first one installed.

I know Lilo can re-install itself by running "lilo" as root, I'd expect Grub to have a similar trick. ( grub-update ?)

hey every body,
ive not yet been weaned from windows and so i 'm trying to dual boot win 2k + redhat9 but all the docs i have had so far seemed to be of red hat 7.1 or there about with LILO. HELP

Here's one way:

Windows tends to prefer to have 2 partitions ( C: and D: ). If you don't have a D: drive and can reinstall Windows, backup your data to CD / DVD and reformat, giving Windows a good 10 GBs, and D the remander of the drive.

Use Disk Druid to delete D and create two new partitions ( SWAP and ext2 file system ) using the space freed from drive D.

Install Grub to MBR.

It should ID the Windows partition and make it an option.

That's pretty much it.

Err... that's all it was for my copy of Redhat 9.0 ...

thnx much,

i shall try this as we speak (type)

I installed REd HAt 9 just recently. I was installing to a separate hard drive from my winXP drive. While Red Hat was installing, it asked me if I wanted it to set up winXP and RH9 as dual-boot. I just clicked yes and it worked fine, I didn't have to fool around at all.

May your adventures be just as uneventful.