Installing to one drive and booting from another

fogpipe · 03-10-2011, 06:45 AM

Im planning on installing a beta of my favorite distro to /dev/hdb from a mounted iso on an /dev/hda partition.

Im not exactly a newbie, but i cant say i have ever done this before. Anyone aware of any issues i might encounter? Is lilo ok booting from one drive to another? Is it ok to just install lilo on the mbr of /dev/hda to boot a distro on /dev/hdb?

Thanks

timdvtemp · 03-10-2011, 08:30 AM

I'm sure it will be fine. The bootloader starts off the mbr of the primary drive, points wherever and does whatever you want it to.

Soadyheid · 03-10-2011, 10:57 AM

Most Distros, when installed, would modify the MBR to boot their associated Lilo or Grub bootloader.
I have a query though... If you have an .iso on /dev/hda this will be an image file which you would have to burn to a CD or DVD before it would be of any use to you. You'd then boot the CD/DVD to carry out the install. Is this what you meant or are you trying to go directly from the .iso to install?

I don't think you can do the latter.

Play Bonny!

jefro · 03-10-2011, 04:45 PM

I'd play with beta's on flash drives if the distro and system support it.

All sorts of problems with dual boots. Grub, grub2 and lilo all have issues and need some tricks to get past some issues.. While one could put an OS somewhere they want root to be mounted normally it may or may not always work like we think. We tend to make a single partition or more to load an OS. Dunno what might happen with installers.

fogpipe · 03-12-2011, 03:58 PM

Thanks everybody, everything turned out ok im booting os's from sda1, sda5 and sdb5.
And i did find a way to install directly from an iso, using vector linux anyway. You mount the iso as a loop device and then look at the install directory there is a readme there that explains the whole thing. Basically just running a script in the same dir as the iso.