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Installing both Redhat7.1 & Mandrake8.1

:jawa:
Hi Freinds

I want to install both Redhat7.1 and Mandrake 8.1 on my comp.

I do not know the exact partioning i need to make and the boot labels to be given.
The Installation I did does not recognize both of them, infact lilo
recognizes only Mandrake ( maybe that is due to the fact that i have not installed lilo of redhat and mandrake does not recognize it ).
I have to boot Redhat from the floopy.

Also I am a bit confused about changing the labels to mount points in the file /etc/fstab, I need to change the mountpoints ( may be rather i have to give partition labels to access both of them ).

Presently I am running Mandrake8.1 and Windowsxp on my comp and I have already left a partition unlabeled for Redhat, and also a small linux partition.

Thanks in advance
Santosh Tiwari:jawa:

well the easiest way to install two linux distro's on the same machine and hard drive is to first install either mandrake or redhat... then after install, copy what you have down in your lilo.conf file for your image of whichever linux you install...
then your going to want to install the next linux distro and during the installation, rewrite lilo during it and install it...
after the install, login as root, make your changes to lilo.conf for your previous install of the linux image.. you only want to add the portion of the image configuration like:

image=/dev/hda1
label=mandrake
readonly

something along the lines of that...

and if you have windows installed also, it should have picked up that and set that up... well i know redhat usually does a good job at recognizing... but i don't know windowsxp and not totally for sure to get that to boot from lilo...
there are other means of boot managers.. you can do a search for others.. i know there is boot magic or something called that can easily configure multiple boots....

I would request you to be more specific about the mount points
and also I would like to know wheather i need to make two boot
partitions for it.

I have already tried and have successfully installed the two distro's but both of them were not bootable.

Not only that the boot labels were matching and therefore i had to use mount points instead of labels.

Thanks in advance for any help

When I had Redhat 6.2 and Mandrake installed on one machine I basically did it the way trickykid described, but to save myself the hassle of sorting out two /boot directories (on two separate hard drives in my case), I just copied my RH kernel to the Mandrake /boot partition and had lilo look there for both. This worked because the two kernels had different names. I then added the appropriate stanzas to lilo.conf to like this:

Code:

image=/boot/<name_of_Mandrake_kernel>

    label=Mandrake

    root=/dev/<location_of_Mandrake_root_partition>



image=/boot/<name_of_Redhat_kernel>

    label=Redhat

    root=/dev/<location_of_Redhat_root_partition>

I then saved the file and re-ran lilo, and everything worked perfectly. Each distro still had it's own /boot directory, but lilo only looked for the bootable kernels in Mandrake's /boot.

As far as editing fstab goes- it won't help you with the dual boot issue. But if you want to boot into one distro and have some of the other distro's partitions mount also, just create mount points for them and add a related line for each in /etc/fstab. For instance- if you're booting into Mandrake, but want the /home partition of Redhat to be available as well, create a /mnt/Redhat directory and then add a line similar to

Code:

mount /dev/hda5 /mnt/Redhat

to fstab. Obviously, the "hda5" is just an example; subsitute the actual partition of the Redhat /home directory instead.

I succesfully installed both Redhat7.1 and Mandrake 8.1 on my comp.
But now I am having problem with booting it .

Actually I have partioned and mounted my hard disk the following way.

/dev/hda1 /mnt/win_c Windows C:
/dev/hda7 /usr ( For Mandrake )
/dev/hda5 /usr ( For Redhat )
/dev/hda11 /home ( Common )
/dev/hda9 Swap ( Common )
/dev/hda11 / ( For Redhat )
/dev/hda12 / ( For Mandrake )

And there exist other windows partitions on my hard disk.

First I installed Redhat and the lilo of it I installed on the following device : /dev/hda11 However an error occurred when it was installing lilo, giving the message that bootloader could not be installed since the Cylinder number is too big. ( It was giving the number as 1024 ).

And then I have installed Mandrake the lilo of it I installed in the MBR.

When I try to boot my comp Mandrade and windows work fine but when I give the option redhat It starts loading it many initializtions fail and it hangs.

I have to boot it from the floopy.

Any suggestions as to what might have gone wrong and how can I correct it without changing my existing partition structure.

Thanks

well finally I have installed both the distros on my comp and they are working fine.

The only error it was that vmlinuz of redhat was not being detected by mandrake since it has read-only. secondly i changed the option in lilo.conf from linear to lba32.

I have presently two lilo's installed one in MBR and second in first sector of root of redhat, and that's the setup it needs. Also it required to change the labels to mountpoints in the file fstab of redhat only.

Thanks