Ubuntu Installation :: Want To Boot Multiple Distros With GRUB
Jun 21, 2011
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.
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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]....
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Oct 31, 2010
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)
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Jun 21, 2011
I have used the following
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.
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Apr 24, 2010
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.
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Feb 19, 2010
My hard disk is :
/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
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Sep 12, 2010
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.
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Dec 15, 2010
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.
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Jul 9, 2011
The system came with Windows 7 installed.
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
[Code].....
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Aug 8, 2010
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.
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Apr 27, 2010
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,
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Dec 2, 2010
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...
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May 11, 2011
I was wondering what the best way is to partition multiple distros to share one home partition.
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Apr 3, 2010
I'm a noob but enjoying dual booting. However, every time I run update manager I get a new vmlinuz entry and now I have multiple boot options in my grub boot menu. Now when I have like 5 ubuntu entries to move past to select Windows. and the latest Ubuntu is always at the bottom so I have to annoyingly scroll down to select the latest there. I don't really understand what the vmlinuzXXX entries in the boot folder are for so I don't want to delete them. I've thought about editing the loop in the 10_linux file in the grub.d folder but it looks like its calling a function or macro or something:
Code:
linux='version_find_latest $list'
But like I said, I'm a noob to all this (a .Net developer on Windows professionally) and don't understand where this is. It looks like this function call has the logic I need to fix. Because its not finding the latest, its just finding all. How to I get back to one Ubunutu boot option like when I first installed?
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Sep 7, 2010
I'm trying to make my own boot CD with different linux distros and tools. These are the things I'm going to include on the CD:Lucid Puppy 5.11 (Live)Damn Small Linux (Live)Gparted LiveArch linux net install(Total size: about 600 MB)I was thinking about using GRUB legacy as the boot manager on the CD, but I'm wondering how I can install GRUB to a CD. I've been experimenting with the live CD of Ubuntu, but when i start to delete the Ubuntu files (which I don't need) it messes up the filesystem manifest and I'm left with a non-bootable .iso. So I want to build GRUB from scratch and add all the entries to the menu.lst.
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Jul 1, 2010
I'm in the process of trying several different distro's live before deciding which I want to run a new net book. So I make I live USB. But what happens if I put moe than one distro on the USB? Will I get a menu to chose? or will I have problems?
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Feb 5, 2011
I can't stay without ubuntu a single day. That's it. I said it. But I definitely need windows 7 cause I'm a heavy gamer. But I also like to keep and use other distros like Fedora. I came to read that only ubuntu uses GRUB 2.0 and it automatically detects all the distros which should be listed by GRUB 1.0. My question is,
How Can i set up the Multiple OS machine Ubuntu + Fedora / BackTrack / Suse + Windows 7? Someone on IRC channel told me that I just install Ubuntu last and it will detect all operating systems automatically.. But I'm a quite reluctant to that kind of short answer. It's now your call experts.
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May 20, 2009
I got Fedora LiveCD version on my USB....but I would like to test many other distros on the same USB. Is there a way to have all of the distros on my USB, and when I open the boot menu on startup, I can choose which distro to boot?
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Jul 15, 2010
How could i use Wubi to install multiple/different distros in one PC? After installing one distro and re-launching Wubi for install the 2nd one requires to uninstall the first one. Is it possible to stop the uninstall routine?
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Sep 15, 2010
I'm interested in testing Maverick, (or the next release, or the one after that) but always run into a problem with testing that runs alone the lines of.I have my current install (10.04) I have two partitions, / and /home, it works well.As soon as I add a new version it seems to be recommended NOT to have them both point to the same /home partition, the problem is, if I don't do that I don't have all my files, and it's a pain in the rear to setup.So what I was thinking is to have three basic partitions,
/
/home (for config files, and true HOME files)
/data (for all my actual data)
Create links from say /home/james/documents to link to /data/documents that way I can get to my documents.This way if I add a new version I can setup either the same (two partitions, / and /home and point /home/xyz/documents to /data/documents) or keep it slightly simpler for testing, just have one partition and repoint /home/xyz/documents to /data/documents.The main one I can think of would be permissions for files/folders?
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Feb 26, 2010
I want to switch to a different distro. So now I have 2 linux distros on my computer, and also win 7 (as a backup). how do i delete the other distros and keep the one I want?
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Jan 19, 2010
I want to install multiple distros on one hd just to get some experience with them. I'm wanting to try out different distros and DE's, so I think I'm settled on wanting to install Ubuntu, Mandriva (or PCLOS), opensuse, and Linux Mint, all on a 40GB drive, giving a little more than 10GB to one of them to use as my primary Linux OS. I also have a current XP install on another hard drive that I'd want to leave connected so GRUB will detect it (not touching it at all during OS installs).
After trying several times to get 4 (or even 3) OS' installed on one drive using one GRUB has been a pain, so it looks like I'll have to put each OS' GRUB on it's respective partition and use one OS' GRUB as a primary in the MBR. With all that being said:
1. What's the best GRUB to use? Much difference between Ubuntu 9.10's and Mint 8's?
2. I'm not worried about saving data on a separate /home partition, so could I use one swap partition and a / root for each OS (giving each one about 10GB)? Would that just mean resizing the previous install's partition and manually creating a 10GB / ?
3. I've read the GRUB 2 guide several times, and when manually adding all of the GRUB's in different partitions to the "main" GRUB, all I need to enter is the title, root entry, and possibly chainloader +1?? This is the area I need the most help in... manually adding entries to GRUB 2... not too worried about Windows because that's usually detected, just adding other distros.
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Jan 15, 2010
I read somewhere that it's good to partition to several partitions, and even better to have separate parts on different hard drives, or even to have different distros, like Ubuntu or this or that UNIX-based OS on different hard drives, to maximize the functioning quality of your server.Unfortunately I only have one HDD and one computer at the moment, and although I can add more later when I've got the $$$, right now I'd like to know the best way to set up a partitioning sequence.
In addition, I have Windows 7 currently installed, and would like to keep it here. I've partitioned my internal HDD which is 250GB to only have 50GB to Windows 7, and I have ALL my data besides relevant application data stored on either my PS3 YDL 6.2, which has a 500GB HDD, and on my 1TB external HDD.So, what is the best partitioning sequence considering 180GB of space, a 50GB Windows 7 partition, and no other hard drives connected to the server? Also what/what OS to put on the different partitions?
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Aug 26, 2010
I just recently purchased a Lenovo Netbook s10 3c which I planned to use for working and such. I have always been interested in the idea of using a Linux system, and so I downloaded the ISOs for Ubuntu Netbook 10.04 and also for Ubuntu Desktop 10.04 and 9.04 as well has Fedora 13. (I wanted to try some out.)
Unfortunately, for ALL of the distros, I run into a snag. When installing any of them, my keyboard will not respond to any keystrokes, even arrow keys, enter or caps lock. I have searched on google, linux forums, ubuntu forums and lenova's site, all to no avail. It seems that everyone who is having problems is having problems with some other sort of system which involves a virtual keyboard or USB keyboard (I do not want to have to use a USB keyboard - that would silly considering I bought the thing for easy portability).
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May 11, 2011
I tried out many distros on my desktop before experimenting with my oshiba Satellite A665 laptop with integrated intel graphics. Everything worked out as normal until I was testing Ubuntu on a live cd, I clicked install and it sent me back to the login screen before I had made an account. So I then chose to restart and it started glitching so I had to manually power off. Ever since then whichever distros I try to install, they face numerous errors. On Ubuntu and Peppermint they freeze on the 5 dots installation part and Linux Mint just has a permanent black screen. Even the current Peppermint OS (only distro i have)hangs on the 5 dots when trying to boot onto the computer. This has resulted me in a computer that cant do anything, i've tried the noquiet and nosplash options but they don't seem to work. I was thinking of installing Windows and maybe erasing the disk by installing another distro later?
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Jun 11, 2011
I have a 16Gig usb drive and i've managed to get Backtrack up and running on it with persistence, but I really want to have on it is Mint, Backtrack 5, if possible Ubuntu and hirens bootcd. I don't really want to use unetbootin. how i need to set up the partitions, if it's possible to have both Backtrack 5 and Ubuntu with persistence since they both use casper-rw and what mint needs for persistence.
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Jul 26, 2010
For some reason I can't seem to get my driver installed on my PC with Nvidia graphics... Only Ubuntu seems to be able to do it and it still doesn't do it correctly..
Heres my hardware
BIOS
Code:
Code:
Code:
Code:
configuration:
memory:
lspci
Code:
On slackware, arch, etc I can't get the driver installed SBOPKG, etc all fail....
They all say it cant find kernel source/modules,etc
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Jan 22, 2011
I am trying to intall multiple distros on an external drive. This drive has no windows installed and I want it solely for Linux use.
When installing the distros from live disks, each time it comes to selecting the partition to install to, I am asked for a mount point. I have used in the first installation but this cannot be used again.
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Apr 8, 2010
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?
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Jul 9, 2011
the title says I have painfully slow(connection times out when loading google) ethernet connection on my new pc. This comp had similar problems with the OEM windows 7 install but now it's strictly a linux box so I'm anxious to get it fixed.
I'm running Ubuntu 10.04 and Slackware 13.37, and have wireless working on Ubuntu but haven't set it up on Slack yet. The only thing I've done so far is try to change speed and duplex using ethtool but it didn't work, the settings stayed the same. I'm writing from another comp so I'll do my best to post any info you request but I'll have to use a flash drive lol
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