I have a small problem in installing both RedHat Enterprise3 and SUSE9 Pro on the same machine. Funnily enough the distros seem to have an issue co-existing with one another!

Which ever distro I install last seems to kill the previous distro and ignores adding the correct parameters to GRUB. SUSE's fs is Reiser and RHEL's is Ext3 (both defaults). I need both on the same system as I will be using the machine for test purposes as I have a new job that will be supporting both distros.

If anyone could help in advising me as to how to get the Shadowman and Chameleon to work in harmony would be great.

You could manually change the parameters of Grub or have you tried that already?

Keep things simple: install the first one with its grub on /dev/hda mbr, and then, the last one with grub/lilo on the begining of its root partition. Then, ask it to make a boot floppy and keep using it until you figure how to point /dev/hda grub to the root second grub.

You can also use smart boot manager to boot either, which is a great software:
btmgr.sourceforge.net/about.html

I've tried changing GRUB's parameters with no luck

I get a root partition (/) conflict if I try and install SUSE last, if I try RedHat last it doesn't even acknowledge the existence of SUSE!

Why do my versions of the venerable penguin disagree so much, yet when I let either of them loose with A N Other OS there are no issues?

It should be some silly thing. Are you trying to install both on the same partition?
If you install linux alongside win, there's fewer problems, cause linux won't install on win's filesystem, so it asks for another dedicated partition.
Between suse and redhat there can be some messing due to both understanding either reiser and ext3.

I did make sure that I wasn't doing a basic mistake like installing on the same partition. The only partition I was trying to share is Swap but this doesn't seem to work either, surely I don't neeed 2 Swap partitions?

So, what are you exactly doing, to install these systems? Post more details, so we can try to figure whats heppening...
You can, of course, edit grub to load both. But until you do, its a good idea to have a floppy or something that you can use to boot the second system.
I'd edit grub mannually, instead of letting the second system edit it. Its not difficult.

hi...

I see that Red Hat and SuSE don't want to play together well.

I got this to work. Here's what I did to get XP/SuSE/RedHat dual boot to work:
(partitioning was 1/4 of disk size for each install, so I have spare afterwards)

- install XP normally
- shrink XP to take only part (~1/4) of hard disk with partition magic.
- install SuSE normally. setting linux partition size to ~ 1/4 of disk size.


This created dual boot XP/SuSE. It created /boot directory which included linux kernals, etc plus /boot/grub/menu.lst with menu for booting the various OSs.

- install Red Hat normally. setting red hat linux partition to be ~ 1/4 of disk size

As someone mentioned earlier, I did get 2 swap partitions by doing this... Perhaps I could have shared swap partitions between SuSE and Red Hat, but I was unclear what would happen, so just allowed normal install to create a second swap partition (I have a big enough hard drive to not worry too much about loss of 1 gig swap).

Here I got a /boot partition and / [root] partition for RedHat. Grub boot manager was set to boot XP or Red Hat linux.

- boot Red Hat
- mount SuSE partition (in my case 'mnt /dev/hda3 /mnt/SuSE')
I was a little surprised at this point to see the SuSE /boot directory was in same partition as root '/' directory... I think that if I were to do this again, after install inf first linux image (SuSE), I'd copy /boot/* to somewhere in /tmp or other directory.


- copy SuSE boot images from SuSE boot region to /boot, copying vmlinuz, system map, coinfig and initrd files using for example 'cp /mnt/SuSE/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.5-7-smp /boot'.

edit /boot/grub/menu.lst, adding SuSE images, and setting proper partition to load them from. For this, I copied in lines from /mnt/SuSE/grub/menu.lst to /mnt/menu.lst and edited those lines to point to proper root, etc).

hope this helps...

Hello,
I just installed Red Hat's Fedora 2 with Suse 9.1 Personal on the same hard disk drive with different partitions sharing the same swap drive.
Suse did not dual boot with Fedora 2. I looked here to find out what other people were doing
I opened YaST and went to BootLoader and checked out the configuration file.
I copied and paste the first line for title Linux that starts Suse to a line right after that. I changed the Title to Fedora and also the partition that holds Fedora; in this case dev/hda3 and Suse is on dev/hda2.
I tested both and it works dual booting into Suse and Fedora 2.
I don't know what effect it will have using the same Linux Image linuxvm if I upgrade Kernel on either system.
Would anyone have an answer to that?
I hope this helps you get on the right track.
Not too bad for a Newbie with Linux.

Well, when I updated the kernel in Suse it screwed up the booting of Fedora.
So my Newbie idea did not work.
I agree why the two distros don't dualboot like dualbooting with Windows?
I also tried editing the Grub.conf in Suse by adding another line pointing to Fedora but I keep getting Error 15. File Not Found when trying to boot Fedora.
I'll just keep trying to figure this out.
Any assistance would be appreciated.

Roger

I was just about to do this for myself when I found your post. I guess you used GRUB and specified a different partition number in the root device field? Can you post your menu.lst and grub.conf here? Thanks.

I set up a triple as mentioned above, but RH first and then SuSE, allowing the latter to overwrite the RH bootloader. I then just edited the Suse bootloader (grub) manually to include RH. I tried sharing e.g. swap without success.

Hello sbuddha, I got frustrated with trying to dualboot Suse 9.1 Personal and Fedora FC2. I reinstalled Fedora FC2 by itself to learn that distro. I am waiting for Suse 9.2 to arrive in early November.

While trying to dual boot the two, I was using GRUB. I did not try LILO at all.

This is no an old Abit BP6 Dual Celeron mobo, 256 Ram, Seagate 80GB HDD, Diamond Viper v770 32MB Ram.

Fedora runs pretty fast on this but I had to add the line ide=nodma to get the smp kernel to stop freezing.

Best of luck to your dual boot and please post what you did to get it working.

Roger

P.S. I tried installing either Suse 9.1 Personal, Fedora FC2 or RH 9.1 on an IBM x20, Dual P3 900mhz, Removable SCSI 18GB hdd, 700 MB ECC ram. Fedora stops in initrd, Fedora will boot CD to the image but says it can't read the Image on the CDROM after that, and RH 9.1 kernel will not load. I guess these distros don't work on server hardware.

Hello Recirqie,
I was able to share swap between Suse 9.1 and Fedora FC2 without a problem.

I installed the swap partition with Suse and reiserfs.

I was able to boot Fedora FC2 with the Suse GRUB but I did not have it correctly setup. When I updated the Suse distro with YaST I was unable to boot Fedora after that update.
Just a Newbie, I am.

Roger

Hello Roger

I have done lots of updates on Suse and XP, but little on RH. It all works, but there is something too deep down for me to fathom that gets mucked up when they share resources. My guess is that there are some pointers or structures in the swap that do not match, unless the kernel is the same version. Anybody know?