Red Hat and Mandrake dual boot
 

I am not exactly a newbie...but I am way down on the food chain so to speak. I installed Red Hat 9 a while back, dual booted it with XP. I have XP on my primary master hard drive which is a 40 Gig, and RH on my primary slave, which is a 200 Gig. I just installed Mandrake 9, which I really like, but on the boot manager it shows only Mandrake (in which there are 3 that do 3 different things but they are all for Mandrake...i believe they are linux, linux w/outfb or something of the sort, and failsafe) and then NT, which is windows XP, they all seem to boot fine, but where did RH go...it's still installed, i can go into partion magic and see that, can anyone tell me where it went and how to get it back?

You need to find out exactly where you installed Redhat (the root partition), mount that partition under Mandrake and copy the Redhat kernel as well as the initrd.img into your /boot folder in Mandrake. once you have done that configure the bootloader via Mandrake control centre and add an entry for redhat and make sure you choose the right partition and kernel. Reboot and hopefully there will be an entry for Redhat and that you can boot into it without any problems.

How do I mount that parition under Mandrake? Also, how do copy the RH kernel and the .img? Sorry I'm not real Linux literate yet...but I am getting there.

1) log into Mandrake, switch to the root user and create a directory in /mnt called redhat, so the command would be

mkdir /mnt/redhat

2) mount your Redhat/Fedora partition sort of like below,

mount /dev/hdxx /mnt/redhat

3) once thats mounted, change into the boot directory of Redhat as follows,

cd /mnt/redhat/boot

4) copy the kernel (vmlinuzXXXX) and initrdXXXX.img to /boot/
cp vmlinuzXXXXX /boot/.
cp initrdXXXXX.img /boot/.

5) change back to the mandrake /boot directory and rename the redhat kernel and initrd image so that you recognise them as redhats and not Mandrakes. I tend to put a "-redhat" at the end of the kernel name and initrd image so that I don't confuse it with mandrakes.

6) open the Mandrake Control center, go to boot and then configure boot loader and add redhat as a session, choose the right partition where redhat is installed and choose the right kernel and initrd.img and reboot your system.


A way to avoid this long process is to use grub as a boot loader instead of lilo, because with grub you don't need to copy the kernel to the other distro's partition. The description above is mainly valid if you are using Mandrake and Redhat/Fedora Core.