Would like some triple boot information.
 

Hello all. I would like to know how to go about triple booting Windows XP, SUSE 9.1, and Mandrake 10.2. I have two hard drives both 20GB's. I only have windows xp installed so far. I have the primary 20GB HD partitioned in half with the rest blank and the other hard drive blank as well. Does anybody know the proper steps i should take before installing linux and once i install the other linux how would i set that up, to give me a triple boot option on start up? Thank you for your time on this matter to all.

Re: Would like some triple boot information.
 

How much do you know about Grub, Lilo, and the MBR?

re: triple boot situation.
 

not much about grub or lilo, is there some advance setup knowledge, i would have to know? I know mbr is the core of the boot up record.

Don't be too intimidated by this, it's not nearly as difficult as it would seem, I could do it and I'm a newbie to linux. I've only done this with Win98, so I'm not going to go into great detail as it could be different.

You already have Win installed, so that's the first step. Now you need to boot off one of the linux CDs and get into cfdisk to partition the rest of the drives. Once that's complete, you can install your first distro. When it's finisted and is ready to install GRUB or LILO, you can either send it to a floppy or to the MBR. When you install the second distro, you won't install LILO or GRUB. This means you will need to manually edit the lilo.conf or whatever GRUB uses. Just go to the bottom and add in the section about the new distro. You can just copy it from the first distro's section changing the drive info.

Do some googling on some of this to get details. Hope this helps some. Sorry for being kind of vague, since I've only done this with Win98, Slackware and Vector, I don't want to steer you wrong.

F_M

edit: Forgot to mention that after you edit and save the lilo.conf file, you will need to use the lilo command for the changes to take affect.

Regarding partitioning: each distro should have a disjoint set of partitions, with the exception of /home.

Once you know enough about the distros and how you're going to use them, you may want to increase the partition intersection set (i.e. have a shared /opt or //local). For this reason, I recommend you investigate which FSes your favorite partition editor is capable of resizing.

hth --Jonas

Re: Triple boot situation.
 

Wow this is very confusing lol. Maybe i shouldn't even bother with the triple boot then, well this is what i'm doing so far. I have installed mandrake, then suse with no boot loader, so now i would have to just configure the lilo config file right?

That sounds about right. Just remember to do lilo after you are finished with the lilo.conf file.

As for sharing partitions, I used 1 /home partition between the 2 distros. But I found that I rarely used anything but Slackware, so I whacked the Vector off the partition and it's now a FAT partition.

Good luck and these people around the forums are incredibly helpful with this type of issue.

F_M

Re: Triple boot situation.
 

what do you mean do lilo? is that a command in mandrake for that? yeah i think i messed this up big time.

This is what i have so far. The bottom part with "SUSE" is a part that i just copied and pasted, but doesn't boot up into suse it just froze. Hope this would help.

message=/boot/message
menu-scheme=wb:bw:wb:bw
image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.11-6mdk
label="Mandrake_LE_2005"
root=/dev/hda5
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append="acpi=ht resume=/dev/hda6 splash=silent"
vga=788
read-only
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label="linux-nonfb"
root=/dev/hda5
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append="acpi=ht resume=/dev/hda6"
read-only
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label="failsafe"
root=/dev/hda5
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append="failsafe acpi=ht resume=/dev/hda6 devfs=nomount"
read-only
other=/dev/hda1
label="windows_xp"
table=/dev/hda
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label="SUSE9.1"
root=/dev/hdb1
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append="acpi=ht resume=/dev/hdb1 splash=silent"
vga=788
read-only

The main points to remember:

1. Always install any Microsoft OS first.
2. When installing the *first* GNU/Linux distro, install GRUB (or LILO, my preference is for GRUB) to the MBR
3. On subsequent distro installs, always install GRUB (or LILO) to the boot sector of the root partition. This refers to the root partition of the distro you're installing *NOT* THE MBR.
4. Unless you have a seperate, small /boot partition, you're always going to have to boot into the *first* GNU/Linux distro to edit /boot/grub/menu.lst in order to point GRUB at new installations. You do this using the following syntax:

title Slackware-10.1
root (hd0,9)
chainloader +1

Obviously, you would change (hdx,x) to represent the partition the distro is installed on.

The reason your lilo.conf above isn't working is that you installed SuSE with no bootloader. Do it again, but this time install LILO (or GRUB) to the boot sector of the root partition.

why not just run lilo/grub instead of reinstalling the OS?

my two cents --Jonas

There's no boot loader installed on the SuSE partition. How would the LILO installed under Mandrake pick up that the SuSE partition should be bootable? There's no bootloader to chainload.

I s'pose the OP could mount the SuSE partition, chroot into it and then install a bootloader to the boot sector of the root partition, but that's beyond me... ;)

Or! Create a GRUB boot floppy under Mandrake, use that to boot SuSE and then install a bootloader to the boot sector of the root partition...?

I've just noticed that in your lilo.confshouldn't the image=/boot/vmlinuz line come after label="SUSE9.1" ?

Re: Triple boot situation.
 

Thank you all for the feed back on this problem. I am currently right now as i type this install mandrake again. Now the part where i get stuck is when i go to install SUSE on my secondary slave, how do i go about setting this up to boot up with the other two OS's? I know someone metioned putting the root partition into the boot section but how?

I figured just mount the partition w. the suse lilo.conf (that writes to the suse root boot sector) and run (whatever) lilo w. that config file.

Dunno how I would go about grub though.

what a Miracle!!!!
 

wow what a miracle i just pulled off! i finally was able to get mandrake and Suse to see eachother during bootup along with xp . I just guess the hd numbers lol. Man this triple boot thing in linux is a very big pain in the A**! It would be great if there was a CBT on how to triple boot systems with linux and windows.

This is what i did below for the mandrake section. Very luck to guess what numbers to put in there.

# Modified by YaST2. Last modification on Mon Aug 8 09:26:56 2005


color white/blue black/light-gray
default 0
timeout 8
gfxmenu (hd1,1)/boot/message

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: linux###
title Linux
kernel (hd1,1)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hdb2 vga=0x317 splash=silent desktop resume=/dev/hdb1 showopts
initrd (hd1,1)/boot/initrd

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: Mandrake 10.2###
title Mandrake 10.2
kernel (hd0,5)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda6 vga=0x317 splash=silent desktop resume=/dev/hda0 showopts

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: windows###
title Windows
root (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: floppy###
title Floppy
root (fd0)
chainloader +1

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: failsafe###
title Failsafe
kernel (hd1,1)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hdb2 showopts ide=nodma apm=off acpi=off vga=normal noresume nosmp noapic maxcpus=0 3
initrd (hd1,1)/boot/initrd

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: Memory Test###
title Memory Test
kernel (hd1,1)/boot/memtest.bin

Whew! Let's back up a minute... what are you trying to accomplish, that you have concluded that "triple booting" is the only way to accomplish it? Step completely away from the question of "how do I do this?" and ask... "what is the problem that you have decided this is necessary to do in order to solve?" (Betcha it isn't...)