Dual booting FC2 with FC1

Jim Cornette jim-cornette at insight.rr.com
Sat May 22 02:23:48 UTC 2004


Dave wrote:

>I installed FC1 to a new machine a week ago. The PC was meant to be a
>'test-bed' machine but having updated and tweaked FC1 over the week I
>find that it's working better than any PC on my LAN so I'm loathe to
>lose it now. :)
>  
>
FC1 is worthy to save. I've dual booted for FC1 ad FC2 for awhile. 
Though I've tried may schemes. I like this refined scheme the best.

*  boot up to your current FC1 install.
* from a root shell run the below command. (If your boot partition is 
installed on this partition)
grub-install /dev/hda1
* Insert disc 1 for FC2 into bootable  CDROM reader.
* reboot system
* select install vs. upgrade
* when installer gets to the partitioning portion, choose to setup your 
own partitions.
* decide and select mount points for your existing FC1 install. 
(/fc1-boot for /boot and fc1-home or fc1-root for root partitions)
* set up a /boot partition on the second hard disk (100 MB)
* setup your / partition and whatever other partitions you desire. (I 
have one swap partition for both FC1 and FC2, other partitions are 
mounted,  but not part of each varying installation.)
* when the installer gets to the boot loader screen, choose add. You 
should have pull-down choices, select hda1. (or wherever your boot 
partition is located). Select an appropriate name for your FC1 installation.

After the installation completes and your system reboots, you should 
have grub from your new FC2 installation installed in the MBR. FC1 
should chainload from the selected boot partition.

Anyway, it works alright for my three fedora installations, on one 
machine. (FC1 on first hard drive, Rawhide on second hard drive, w/ 
multimedia and FC2 Final within an extended partition /dev/hdb5 with  
boot partition, all 3 systems swap partition and a seperate root partition).

In my case, I need to install the OS that is in the extended partition 
into MBR. After running grub-install /dev/hda1 for the first drive 
within FC1 and running grub-install /dev/hdb1 from within the rawhide 
install. Selecting hda1 for FC1 and hdb1 for rawhide, during the 
extended partition installation, works for my setup.

You don't need to edit the grub file for every kernel change. Each of 
the 3 grub versions does it's own housekeeping and does not interfere 
with the other versions you have. Of course with three versions of Grub, 
you might desire to change the splash image for each version.

>I have a spare new Hard Drive to install to this machine so I'm going to
>install FC2 to the new disk and keep FC1 on the master disk.
>
>Will the new FC2 installation add to the grub entries automatically so I
>can still boot FC1?
>
>The last time I multi-booted was with RH6.2 with Windows95 using LiLo!
>
>  
>
Jim

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