Dual boot Mandrake9.1 RedHat9
 

Hi all

I'm fairly new to Linux (1-2 months) and I'm trying to dual boot Red Hat 9 and Mandrake 9.1 on the same hard drive - I'm having problems. I've installed Red Hat 9 first with a boot,root and swap partition and put grub in the mbr - then I installed Mandrake 9.1 in the free space on the same drive - again I created a boot,root and swap partition and put "Mandrakes" Lilo in the mbr - so basically I've just got Lilo in the mbr at this point - when I come to boot up the Lilo menu only shows entries for Mandrakes options and doesn't contain a Red Hat option aswell - so I've then gone into Mandrakes Lilo.conf and added an entry to make Lilo point to Red Hats Kernel image, Red Hats root partition and Red Hat init file - this is were the problems start though - I've then /sbin/lilo to make sure the new Red Hat entry goes into the Lilo menu for when I next boot up, which it does - the problem is that when I next boot up and click on the Red Hat entry I get a series of error messages including things like mount: error 6 and kernel panic etc etc - I suspect its due to Lilo not being able to mount Red Hats root partition and maybre not pointing right to the Red Hat kernel and init file - I'm pretty sure I have completely misunderstood something but the only way I could point to the Red Hat kernel and init file and root partition ""succesfully""???? was by mounting the Red Hat boot and root partitions in Mandrake in a dummy directory that I created - what I don,t understand is - how is Red Hats kernel meant to find ReD Hats root partition etc when its Mandrake which mounts Red Hats boot/root partitions so Lilo can point to the right Red Hat files - I'm confused here and have completly misunderstood something - but can anybody explain how it works and also how to sort it out.

Appreciate any advice

Skyline

use the same boot loader for each (expert mode during install). skip the bootloader w redhat (win98se boot disk fdisk /mbr to remove boot loader from mbr), and use the bootloader w/ mandrake, and specify the partitions that you want to boot up, and /dev/hda1 for the mbr. if on controller card, then point mbr to that hdd's first partition (provided it's the only hdd- just put bootloader to hdd that is the lower letter- ex two hdd's one is /dev/hde, other is /dev/hda, then hda is where the mbr is, and point the boot loader to it- make a boot floppy, so that you can boot into the os, and rework the boot process if necessary). so remove boot loader from mbr, then use mandrake to set a bootloader to the mbr, specifying both kernel partition mount points.

now, i haven't performed this, but from what you describe, the 2 different boot loaders is wrong- you'll use just one bootloader for all your os's (windows as well).

the other thing that might be wrong is having 2 swap files. i think that only one is needed for all the linux os's- though i'm not 100% certain. i haven't tried this yet, but i certainly would like to have a couple of distros to choose from.

linux will not boot correctly from extended partitions (or so they say). if you are setting up the /boot partition past the 8gig mark (1024 cylinder), then you might have to force lba during set up of mount points.

give the fdisk /mbr routine a try though, and use one boot loader, and point to the correct partitions, and point bootloader to mbr of /dev/hda1. good luck!

bump for critique, and further insight from the more experienced!

is it possible to just create 1 swap file (extended, at end of hdd), and have 4 primary / (root) partitions, w/o /boot mnt pt, and load 4 distros successfully (make a floppy boot disk to each, but only place the bootloader to the mbr at the 4th partition/ linux os install, adding a boot option for each / mnt pt?)?

Well Hi :-)
ähm, i do try since a couple of days to make four Distris to boote from one hda (SuSE 8.0 SuSE8.1 Mandrake 9.1 Knoppix 3.1) of course everyone is overriding the existing mbr but even if i try to put the boot information during installation on e.g. /dev/hda3 (SuSE8.0) SuSE 8.1 wouldn´t recognize (in YaST2 the Bootloader can look for another installed os and i thought at this point it should find the boot information from SuSE8.0 on /dev/hda3 but it doesn´t. So what am i doing wrong? I f i search for vmlinuz or initrd on / i don´t find??? so i even can´t tell the system manually. I´d be really glad for anyone helping me.

Odan

Hi guys - thanks for the replies - I'm thinking of trying to put the Red Hat 9 kernel image vmlinuz-2.4.20-8 and its initialisation file initrd-2.4.20-8.img into Mandrakes boot partition because Iknow lilo can succesfully access Mandrakes boot partition in my setup -I'd like to try and get this idea nailed because I want to try out lots of different distros over the coming year - I'm probably going to have to post my Lilo.conf and fstab files at some point hopefully somebody will be able to spot my errors straight away or something.

Cheers again - skyline