Multi Boot Question

[runtt21]

Hello, I have been running Sabayon ,Fedora 7 & Ubuntu off of their live cd's/dvd and I like all of them.I am getting a extra hard drive (500 gb)for my computer and I wanted to know if I can install all of them on it. Will that make too many partitions on the hd? Will they all "live together"? Is there any order I should install them in? And has anyone else done this before?

[navman]

an easy way to do that is after each install save the menu.lst in /boot/grub directory to someplace safe (flashdrive. etc.) and then when you've installed the last system edit that menu.lst with the other menu.lst. That way you'll have the right info.

[runtt21]

so it can be done.... does it matter which distro gets installed first?

[WarraWarra]

Not as far as I know as long as you can get grub to work all should be fine.

You might want to write each Distro to it's own partition ie: write grub to /dev/sda7 instead of MBR so if anything goes bad all the others can still boot and not all your boot configs = bad.
Then make 1 grub on the mbr that lets each distro / partition ? chainload or something like this.

Hope it helps.

[runtt21]

how do you set up a chainload?

[WarraWarra]

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/4622
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Multiboot-with-GRUB-2.html

http://www.brunolinux.com/05-Configurin ... _grub.html
http://club.mandriva.com/xwiki/bin/view ... oadingGrub
http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_Chainloading ... _from_GRUB

One of these should tell you how. I am not 100% sure about the precise correct way as I only boot max junkloads + Sabayon at any one time.
You can also if having a windows partition then use Acronis disk director's Os selector program that might work as well just not sure how good.
Lilo for the main boot loader could also work as it can pass the boot over to each partition and then ? execute the grub on there to boot or just boot the partition directly. Not sure.

Hope this helps, have to searc / mod the info a bit to get a working solution.