Installation :: Multibooting Multiple Distros With A Separate / Boot Partition For GRUB
Mar 27, 2010
Noobish question on multibooting multiple Linux distros. I have four of the current major Linux distributions. Each has been installed and run individually (no other Linux distribution installed) in a dual-boot configuration with Windoze. No problem.
What I want to do is install all four Linux distributions and multiboot them. Reading the internet it would seem this is a simple task with GRUB. The short version being - install a Linux distro with a separate /boot partition for GRUB and use GRUB to boot the other Linux distros from the GRUB boot menu.
So I installed one of the Linux distros with a separate partition for /boot. The distro installer installed GRUB in /boot and correctly setup a dual-boot configuration with Windoze. GRUB was installed to the MBR. Next I installed a second Linux distro in its own root partition and told the distros installer NOT to install GRUB to the MBR, but rather, to the boot sector of the root partion of the second Linux distro. Installation was uneventful (and I could access the second Linux partition from the first installed Linux distro, things looked ok). Then I added to following to the installed (MBR - /boot) GRUB's menu.lst:
Code: title lixux distro 2
root (hd0,7)
chainloader +1 After which I rebooted the system and the new entry for the second Linux distro now appears in the GRUB boot menu. I selected the second Linux distro from the boot menu and got the following GRUB error: Error 5 : Partition table invalid or corrupt
[Code]....
I currently am in an adventurous phase and want to try other distros while still having a reliable, stable Ubuntu installation to fall back on. I'm currently in the process of partitioning my disks, and I realized that I might have trouble booting them, as the most recently installed would control GRUB and clobber any previous GRUB setup. So what I want to know is how to go about managing everything so that only one distro, preferably Ubuntu, has control of the GRUB menu at boot up, and will still recognize the other distros on other partitions.
I plan to have three 15GB root partitions, one swap, and one home partition for each distro.
Would I create a /boot for each distro? Or create one /boot with files from each distro copied there? Or should I do something else entirely? I just don't want the distros to interfere with each other. Also, I don't want to use VMs for this, because I want to see what a real full-performance install is like for each distro.
While installing with a separate /boot partition I cannot get two distinct copies of ubu installed on one machine and be able to choose between them. Each is installed on a different hard drive. x64 versions. I've had this issue both ways:
Stepsinstall mythbuntu install ubuntu Result
Two entries in grub. Both cause ubuntu to boot
Stepsinstall ubuntu install mythbuntu Result
Two entries in grub. Both cause mythbuntu to boot Grub 2 is so unfriendly for fixing these things. I don't know where to make changes. Ok, Grub 2 is very powerful, maybe it's the lagging documentation, or lack of tutorials that is the problem. But I don't know how to fix this. Do I start over without the /boot partition? Do I bail on ubu?
Where can I install grub? I know it can be installed to the mbr of a hard drive. I also know it can be installed to a /boot partition. Can I install it to a lvm partition? Does it have to be /boot? grub-install --root-directory=/boot /dev/hda Does this command install grub to a partition and link it to a separate /boot? I have fedora, but this is a live cd. I need to learn where I can install grub2 to boot
With the startup disk creator on Ubuntu (Currently running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS) I realised you could boot Ubuntu from a USB and then install it onto the HDD if you wish to. *Side note* Still amazes me you can run a whole operating system from a USB memory stick drive *End Side note* Now My question is: 'Is it possible to have multiple distros of Linux on a USB memory stick and choose which one you wish to boot from when you boot up the computer?'I was hoping to get a seagate portable HDD ((here) and load quite a few different Linux distros on it to get a broader view of Linux than just Ubuntu (Although Ubuntu does rock ).
Is there simple ways of doing this? I have read around this forum and Google and a suggestion was given to install all of the distros onto the portable HDD/ USB memory stick and then install Ubuntu onto it last as its good for picking up other OSes in its GRUB. (Again if my idea on GRUB and its workings are wrong please point it out - got to keep learning)
Added an SSD (dev/sdc) and decided to move some less often changed directories there. Started with /usr and /boot, leaving / on a primary in the first drive, for now. All started ok, and my changed fstab mounted the right ones, and the system works.
However, grub is actually using the original /boot on / on sda1. I cannot see any way to change this. (Which makes it sorta hard to update the kernel
From grub:
Okay, since it has two choices, I tried to tell it which one to use. But, grub> root (hd2,5) does nothing.
Disk /dev/sda:
what I seem to recall, grub doesn't care about the boot flag on the disk. Nor does it care about primary vs. logical (except GNU doc says "makeactive" only works on a primary?).
The GNU doc also indicates that it looks for a directory /boot on the partition, so if you're mounting a partition as /boot, it also needs to contain a /boot directory under it. Tried that, but no change.
Is my problem the logical partition? Does that prevent "grub> root" from changing it? I'm afraid to wipe out the old /boot and find that I can't start up.
I have a 320gb USB hard drive, one partition for my files, one for playing Wii games, and one which I would like to use for an Ubuntu instillation.o do this, I partitioned my disk accordingly using Windows, then booted from the Ubuntu CD to install the OS to my external hard drive partition. It asked me where I wanted to install the boot loader, so I selected the hard drive itself, rather than the specific partition, reasoning that it would scan the hard drive for a boot record.However, when I booted it (with USB boot selected) it simply said "No Operating System found, replace system disk and press en
Code: #Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: none# title Ubuntu 10.04 booting via symlinks kernel (hd0,6)/vmlinuz root=/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST9500325AS_6VE3ZHX6-part7 ro quiet splash initrd (hd0,6)/initrd.img for Ubuntu for some time. Can this symlinks-booting technique (with the appropriate partition numbers/names) be used for LinuxMint and/or Fedora ?
Currently, I have one PC with Ubuntu's GRUB2 managing multiple distros (openSUSE 11.3 and 11.4, Ubuntu, Linux Mint and Fedora) with Windows 7. I would like to replace it with the openSUSE GRUB, and the Ubuntu, LinuxMint and Fedora are rarely used.
I have been a happy little GRUB user for a while now, but now I want to use GRUB to boot a physically separate WinXP hard drive, and I can't seem to do that. Normally GRUB is easy, (I even have a nice splash screen of my own making). Its a champion solution for booting into Ubuntu Linux on /dev/sda5 or Win XP on /dev/sda1.
My second HD which Linux recognizes as /dev/sdb, has a Win XP boot sector and Win XP in one partition.
Normally I boot off /dev/sda using GRUB, and from Linux I can mount and have access to /dev/sdb - that works well. Occasionally however, I need to boot the separate Win XP system on the second HD, and to do that I switch the boot drive in the BIOS, but lately that is getting to be a bit tedious.
Initially I though to give the additional boot choice to GRUB, I simply had to edit /boot/grub/menu.lst and point to the second HD (where /dev/sdb = hd1 in GRUB speak). Unfortunately, when I select the new choice, it simply boots Win XP off the first HD.
I'm confident GRUB does look at the first partion on hd1 as expected as I can induce an error by having hd1 disconnected, or write silly partion numbers into menu.lst. So if it does in fact find the first partion on hd1, why doesn't it boot? Why does it default to WinXP on hd0?
I have diligently tried physically swapping SATA drive cables and playing with bios switching and have messed about a fair bit with menu.lst to make sure I have drive and partition numbers right, but all to no avail. I have also tried changing rdisk(0) in boot.ini to rdisk(1) on the second drive when it is not the boot drive.
I'm afraid the only other thing I can think of is that the second hard drive requires a Linux boot sector if I am going to boot it up from GRUB, but somehow that doesn't make sense. Surely GRUB can work across physically separate drives, so I'm open to other ideas first.
Trying to dual-boot OpenSolaris and FC10 is difficult because Solaris grub doesn't know about ext3 and Fedora grub doesn't know about ZFS. I was able to rescue my FC10 installation by creating a new FAT16 partition and restoring /boot to it from a dump, and then doing a grub setup to it. A complication is that anaconda doesn't seem to be able to find /dev/md0 (both the Solaris and FC10 installs use mirrored disks).
This process moved the FC10 ext3 partition from /dev/sda3 to /dev/sda4, but the other half of the mirror is still /dev/sdb3.
When I boot FC10 I get a "can't load image" error from grub, but it still loads FC10 successfully. It makes no difference if menu.1st/grub.conf has "root (hd0,1)" (the FAT16 partition) or "root (hd0,3)" (the FC10 ext3 partition).
If a future yum update were to try to install a new kernel, my FAT16 partition would not be updated. It seems to me both these problems might be solved if I could move /boot from /dev/md0 to /dev/sda2 (/dev/sda2 is the FAT16 partition).
Rather than go through yet another install, would the following work?
from FC10, move /boot to (say) /boot.0 mkdir /boot edit fstab to include "mount /dev/sda2 /boot"
If I try this and it doesn't work, I can't see any way to undo it since anaconda doesn't seem to be able to mount /dev/md0. If a grub guru sees this, perhaps they could suggest a better alternative, or if not, whether this will work or not.
Additionally, although there are two alternatives in menu.1st/grub.conf, grub doesn't display a menu - it goes directly to boot. Any idea why? I suppose this might be a Solaris stage1 grub problem...
Since FAT16 doesn't support links, it isn't possible to link grub.conf to menu.1st. Are they both required?
Everything works fine, the setup went very well. But I got to thinking (A dangerous thing for me). In Ubuntu I am using separate partitions for / (root) and /home. I was wondering, during install of Fedora, could I use the separate partition I am using now for both root and /home for just / (root) and use the Ubuntu /home partition for Fedora (set the mount point for /home to the same partition as I did for Ubuntu and not format the drive)? This would allow me to seamlessly use the /home partition and not require duplication of files. I can mount the Ubuntu /home dir while in Fedora.I can share the /home partition with two different installs of Ubuntu (been there).
I have a 320gb USB hard drive, one partition for my files, one for playing Wii games, and one which I would like to use for an Ubuntu instillation.
To do this, I partitioned my disk accordingly using Windows, then booted from the Ubuntu CD to install the OS to my external hard drive partition. It asked me where I wanted to install the boot loader, so I selected the hard drive itself, rather than the specific partition, reasoning that it would scan the hard drive for a boot record.
However, when I booted it (with USB boot selected) it simply said "No Operating System found, replace system disk and press enter" or something similar.
I've got an external hard drive with one large data partition on it. I also have four computers to connect it to (individually, not at the same time). Three machines are running Slackware and one is running Ubuntu 9.10. I need to be able to just plug the drive into whichever machine, mount it (preferably to the same location each time) and not have to worry about user permissions and such. Do I just chmod 777 all the files and folders or is there a better method for different 'users' to access the same partition? And how about mounting to the same location each time?
Now the second part of my question I'm pretty sure I'm not able to do but just in case..... is there any way to encrypt the information safely and make it compatible with a Windows XP machine?
install fedora 11 on Vista I want to keep the windows boot loader and also install on a usb drive or a seperate partition that has 10GB free "install doesn't see partition's". Recently I installed ubuntu and had a major problem with booting, without having the usb drive connected I couldn't boot windows so uninstalled it. I'm trying to install now but install does'nt give me any option to select partitions from my drives one 320GB "portable, 3 partitions" and 80GB "main os 2 partitions one partition has 10GB free"
I dual boot multiple distros of Ubuntu and I'm trying to use my /home from 9.10 for 10.04 also.Is this possible? If not, does anyone know if I can copy sections of my 9.10 Crossover files to my 10.04 /home. Biggest thing is for WoW which takes forever to load each new distro I upgrade to.
So I need to become the root user in order to edit a grub file in a seperate partition, so I can get back into this partition. How can I become and stay as root user in the desktop environment? (I know you shouldn't do this, but I need it.)
/dev/sda2 Primary Linux ext3 /dev/sda3 Primary Windows /dev/sda5 Logical Linux ext3 /boot /dev/sda6 Logical Swap /dev/sda7 Logical Linux Ext3 /home /dev/sda8 Logical Linux ext3 / [Code]...
After this install I wished to try out Backtrack 4 which I installed on /dev/sda2. The version of GRUB which was installed with Ubuntu 9.10 got wiped out and the version of GRUB with backtrack was installed . However the menu did not consist of the Ubuntu 9.10 booting option . How should I edit menu.lst so that I can get all my Ubuntu 9.10 booting option along with my backtrack installation
I know it's possible to to have multiple distros on one hard disk, and set it up so you can just have one /home partition and use it for all of the distros on that system. My question is, how efficient is that? Does it bloat the /home out with a whole bunch of stuff that might slow a particular distro down because it's filled with stuff from another? (I.e configs). And let's say I have two distros that are of different bases, say ubuntu and arch, does this make a difference? I know obviously that my personal files will all be accessible and not matter which distro they are being read from, but I'm talking more about the hidden stuff.
I dual booted Karmic on my old laptop. I just received my new machine, Envy 17 with a 160 GB SSD and a 640 GB hard drive with Windows 7 pre-installed. I want to multiboot Windows, Maverick and the CAElinux distro, on the SSD I am thinking. I am in the process of searching the forums in regards to partitioning strategies and hints to smooth the installs.
After installing Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty) with Unity, I installed Xubuntu 11.04. All three OSes could be seen in the GRUB menu and I could boot any OS of choice.
Then I installed OpenSUSE 11.4. I suspect it installed legacy GRUB on the OpenSUSE root partition. Thereafter, I was not able to boot Ubuntu or Xubuntu.
I have now used a LiveCD (system rescue mode) to re-install GRUB on the MBR. However, I can only boot Win7 or Ubuntu. Can't access Xubuntu or OpenSUSE.
The results of my boot-info file are as reproduced below:
Code: Boot Info Script 0.60 from 17 May 2011 ============================= Boot Info Summary: =============================== => Grub2 (v1.99) is installed in the MBR of /dev/sda and looks at sector 1 of the same hard drive for core.img. core.img is at this location and looks
How is this supposed to work out? I noticed some distros are really good about recognizing your other linux distros and some not. They keep recognizing windows, but not other linux distros. Also, I have run into a few problems when my operating systems were on different hard drives. I have my operating systems running from a small 250gb laptop hard drive with special mounting and am using my TB hard drive for internal storage /data.However, my last attempt at installing a linux partition on the TB hard drive with Windows and another linux partition on the laptop hard drive didnt work out so well. Updating grub via the command line didnt sort this out. Sudo su root Apt-get update grub (or grub update) or whatever didnt work before when I tried it.
got four partitions, one for media storage, one with ubuntu 9.10 32bit, one with crunchbang lite 9.04 64bit and one swap partition. The partition with ubuntu has been formated from ext4 to fat32 (with nothing on it, obviously). Whenever I boot up the pc now, I get an "unknown filesystem" error and a grub rescue> prompt. When I try to boot up a live usb image from my usb stick I either get a "linux kernel not found" message (crunchbang lite 32bit) or "initial menu has no LABEL entries!" error (gparted live usb) which changes to "Could not find kernel image: vesamenu.c32" after a couple of seconds. save my media partition or, more importantly, my crunchbang lite partition (which has one single important file on it, I'd love to recover). If this is somehow not possible, then I'd at least like to get my system usable again by succesfully booting from usb. I'm fairly new to using linux. I tried some grub-rescue commands, but not even the "help" command worked,
is their a boot partiton that need to be kept seperate in ubuntu? Screenshot.png those are my partitons in the pic above am i okay to merge them all into the dev/sda2 or is it like windows and i need to keep a small section back for the boot?
P4 2.4gHZ 2.0GB Ram I have tried to do some reading on this by googling and such, but it is all a bit overwhelming and so many posts/articles want to deal with dual booting which I am not planning to do on this machine. I am trying to find some info on whether it is better to have a separate boot partition. As in, separate from root partition. I have read that a separate boot partition makes for a quicker start and better recovery if system crashes. I will shortly be installing openSuse 11.2(KDE) [currently on 11.0] and I want to optimise the partition scheme so that it is the most efficient. I have a 160GB HDD that will be housing this new installation, so space is not a problem. I am only user on this machine. Currently, it is just partitioned as such:
2.0GB - swap [because I read it should equal Ram] 32.0GB - / 40.0GB - /home 76.8GB - extra storage [Not really necessary as I have 2 other HDD on system 1 - 320GB and 1 - 200GB]
Also, is it recommended to have separate partitions for /tmp /var or any other /nnn ?
I have a 320gb USB hard drive, one partition for my files, one for playing Wii games, and one which I would like to use for an Ubuntu instillation. To do this, I partitioned my disk accordingly using Windows, then booted from the Ubuntu CD to install the OS to my external hard drive partition. It asked me where I wanted to install the boot loader, so I selected the hard drive itself, rather than the specific partition, reasoning that it would scan the hard drive for a boot record. However, when I booted it (with USB boot selected) it simply said "No Operating System found, replace system disk and press enter" or something similar.
I have been working in my spare time over the last few days, Had problems with the whole grub2 not installing on RAID 1. Then I found out that I had to have a separate non raid Ext4 partition on one drive with "/Boot" as mount point and install went though fine.
My question is, will the developers FIX this. I mean if I only have 2 x 2tb drives in teh pc as RAID 1, and the one fails with the boot partition the whole machine goes down. Kinda defeats the whole RAID feature huh.
I USED to run a windows network with RAID 5 servers, and windows never had a problem installing everything on the RAID. Or even setting up RAID 1 in the bios on the PC and installing XP or NT4 on the RAID 1. There was never a need for a separate non raid boot partition.
Do we need a separate RAID friendly/enabled Grub? I guess for now I will get a 250gb drive and install the Server OS to it, and setup RAID1 manually after the server OS boots. Then will make a ghost type image of the server in case that drive fails so I can quickly install a new drive and restore the image and get it back up and running again.
I have 2 distros installed right now and generally keep the main one and install and look at other distros.My question is this; Can I install a second distro and not let it take over my frub/boot menu and NOT let it control the boot menu? If so how would I do it? I always get confused when I install the second distro when it asks what to do,use / or boot as the option etc...
I am new to Debian but have some basic experience with Linux and am currently trying to triple boot Windows 7, Fedora 16, and Debian on an HP Pavilion dv7. I have the Windows Boot Loader on my MBR because I've heard that Windows updates can cause boot issues if GRUB is installed there. This means that I've been installing GRUB in the /boot partition for each Linux distro and creating corresponding entries in the Windows boot menu.
This has worked in the past with both Fedora and Ubuntu, but I have not been able to work around it with Debian. When I choose my Debian option in the Windows boot loader, it loads GRUB but hangs after it prints "Welcome to GRUB!", and I have to restart the computer. I would like to hear what more experienced Linux users have to say both about why this isn't working for Debian and about if keeping the WIndows boot loader is the right way to go.
Also, here is my partition layout:
Partition 1: SYSTEM (HP pre-installed) (209 MB) Partition 2: Windows Partition (472 GB) Partition 3: Extended (160 GB) 1: /boot for Fedora (524 MB) 2: Physical Volume for other Fedora partitions (79 GB) 3: /boot for Debian (749 MB) 4: Physical Volume for other Debian partitions (80 GB) 118 GB free space Partition 4: HP_TOOLS (HP pre-installed) (108 MB)
I have PC with following specs: Intel E7500 CPU / Intel G31 Motherboard Kingston 800MHz 2GB RAM Hitachi 500 GB SATA HDD + Seagate 160 GB SATA HDD
I initially had only 500 GB HDD. I installed two installations of Windows 7 Ultimate - one 32-bit and one 64-bit installations. Both working fine.
Later on I installed the 160 GB HDD and installed Fedora 13 in it in a partition. The rest space of the 160GB I am using with Windows for storing data.
Now, the boot entries of both Windows installations are in the Grub Loader of F13. Means, if I remove the 160GB HDD, I cannot boot into my Windows installations.
Now I want to remove the 160 GB HDD and install a new 2TB hard-drive. That way, I cannot log into my Windows. And I do not want to lose the Linux installation also.
How can I remove the 160 GB HDD and install a new one without sacrificing my Windows installations?
OR...Is it possible that I can copy complete image of F13 on to the new HDD, so that things are same for the Windows installations?
