need help regarding dual booting of operating systems
 

hai to all

i have system with xp and fedora 9 ,every thing is fine and i planned to install deepofix mail server in my system for that i created an unused free space of 8GB(no format,no file system). deepofix is debian based but it is not installing in that free space,it shows that installation is complete(without any installation, simply empty ).

i had a doubt deepofix uses the same /home ,/swap ,/boot and grub as the boot loader .but i have already installed fedora 9 with the same /home , /swap ,/boot and grub as default .
is that these two things(fedora's / and deepofix's / partitions) making trouble to install ??????? . if so,how to over come this problem ??????

any suggestions will help me to achieve a lot

thank in advance to allllllllllllll

Hi

for a distro to work, it needs its own root partition. Sharing different /, /boot, /usr etc. partitions between different installed distros is generally a bad idea (except maybe for a /home partition, but I'm not sure there). Since you made 8GB of free space, you can make a root partition in it (with e.g. EXT4 or XFS file system). The installer should be able to make a partition in the free space and make it mount on /. You don't necessairily need extra partitions like /boot, /usr, or /home, though they are useful when things go wrong (I always use an extra partition for /home, so I can reinstall my system and just keep my user settings).

Was that what you needed to know?

thanks for your quick response ...

my question is that , when i installed fedora 9 in my system with 20GB space ,it parted that 20GB into 16GB and 256mb for something which i dont know (since i am new to linux).these thing i came to see in my xp device manager->disk management settings ..

initially i alloted 20 GB for linux .But ,what is that 256mb partition ? that shows in my xp device manager settings..

and the fedora uses GRUB loader ,in the same way deepofix also uses the grub loader .when i installed fedora it placed it's GRUB loader into MBR . so if i install deepofix where will it place it's GURB loader ... ? won't they collide with each other ???

thanks in advance

Grub in the MBR is ok, you will have multiple OSes defined in grub to boot from, you just choose one, some installers will autodetect OSes and ad the to grub, other will not and you have to add them manually. You can safely share the /home partition, but Each distro does need it's own root or "/" partition.