[PLUG] Three Linux systems, one boot partition...

[Michael C. Robinson]

On Tue, 2003-08-26 at 23:54, Felix Lee wrote:
> "Michael C. Robinson" <michael at goose.robinson-west.com>:
> > I'd like to uninstall lilo from all but one system.
> 
> Why?  What does that gain you?
> --
> 
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On the one system that has lilo installed, it can be 
programmed to boot the other two keeping administration 
simpler.  For the system I intend to use as an nfs_root 
system it's only temporarily going to be a local system 
anyways.  For installing multiple Linux systems to the 
same hard drive I'd say it's best to only install lilo 
once and then program that one installation of lilo to 
boot all of the systems.  On a system your messing with, 
having lilo installed to it and potentially having that 
installation of lilo be the one your booting, it is too 
easy to break booting for all of the installed Linux 
systems.  Of course, if you use fdisk or mount the 
partitions of your other systems when your messing 
around you can still muck everything up pretty 
good :-)  I had hoped to get a netboot image of
Tom's Root Boot going, but I can't remember how to
set it up.  I probably used an iso image of
Tom's Root Boot before to get a kernel and initrd 
off of.

Lilo can be installed to the master 
boot record or to the first sector of the 
boot partition.  There can be three primary 
partitions and many extended ones.  However, 
I believe all boot partitions, even on modern
computers, have to be below the first 500-1024 
megs of the hard drive.  For every boot 
partition one installation of lilo is possible.  
I only have one, albeit large, boot partition.

Why do I have a problem?  I have dos 
installed on this machine which if I 
remember right has to be at the 
beginning of the drive reducing the 
room I have for a secondary or tertiary
boot partition.  Plus, it's hard to add
boot partitions with Windows 98 and dos
already installed after the fact.  There 
would be some moving around of partitions 
and I'd still probably need to dump 
partitions and clear the partition table 
completely.

If I were rich it would be one hard disk per 
operating system, but only just now with the 
advent of serial ATA allowing up to seven 
drives is that even a practical approach.  
Granted there's scsi, but that can still 
be a real hassle since ATA controllers 
often don't like to disable hogging the 
resources the scsi card needs to work.  
My Pentium four has four of these ATA 
controllers.  Considering my tape drive 
doesn't work, I'm not going to dump the 
partitions to tape, repartition, and 
restore.

Using one boot partition can save hard 
drive space.  Considering the possibilty 
that all your Linux systems, or all but 
one, will use custom kernels, there 
aren't overlap issues.  The only 
real problem is if you try to add say 
Redhat 6.2 to a Redhat 7.x or Redhat 9 
environment since the root and boot 
filesystems have changed from ext2 to 
ext3.

     --  Michael