Dual Boot

[JB]

Marvin Kosmal <mkosmal <at> gmail.com> writes:

> 
> Hi
> 
> I want to dual boot FC13 and Sabayon5.3
> 
> I googled and there are thousands of dual boots out there..
> 
> Does Fedora have a simple good one?
> 
> TIA
> 
> Marvin
Hi,
you are very enigmatic with that "there are thousands of dual boots out there".
Regardless, I will try to help, if the below is what you mean.

Let's assume you have a fresh disk.

You install F13 by formatting the disk accordingly (that is you take some space
for F13, leave some for other distros/OS's), and install its boot loader (GRUB)
to MBR, by which it becomes the main boot loader for F13 and other installations.

Then, you install your other distro (e.g. Sabayon), but install its boot loader
to its own root partition (/boot subdirectory).

Next, you boot F13, sign in as root and modify its GRUB to present you with
a boot menu that includes Sabayon, by whose selection you also boot it).

Assuming that you partitioned the sda disk like:
/dev/sda1         # F13 root partition, which corresponds to "root (hd0,0)"
/dev/sda2         # Sabayon root partition, which corresponds to "root (hd0,1)"

here is an example cut of a dual boot GRUB config file:

# cat /etc/grub.conf
...
title Fedora (2.6.33.6-147.2.4.fc13.i686)
        root (hd0,0)
        kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.33.6-147.2.4.fc13.i686 ro
root=UUID=4a459357-74f1-4bb2-8924-0a834b58982c rd_NO_LUKS rd_NO_LVM rd_NO_MD
rd_NO_DM LANG=en_US.UTF-8 SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 KEYBOARDTYPE=pc KEYTABLE=us
noiswmd rhgb quiet
        initrd /boot/initramfs-2.6.33.6-147.2.4.fc13.i686.img

title Sabayon
       rootnoverify (hd0,1)
       chainloader +1

JB