penta-booting hard-disk: who would administer the hard-disk office?

[Ralf Corsepius]

On 11/25/2011 05:04 PM, g wrote:
>> On 11/25/2011 07:04 AM, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> <>
>
>> I.e. I have a "master grub" /boot partition, which chainloads indivdual
>> "boot" partitions of other OSes.
>>
>> I.e. my partitioning basically looks like this:
>> /dev/sda1	boot (master grub partition, contains only grub).
>>
>> /dev/sda<N>	OS<N>'s /boot
>> /dev/sda<N+1>    OS<N>'s swap
>> /dev/sda<N+2>    OS<N>'s /
>>
>> /dev/sda<M>	OS<M>'s /boot
>> /dev/sda<M+1>    OS<M>'s swap
>> /dev/sda<M+2>    OS<M>'s /
>
> years back when i started playing with slackware linux, i still had oos
> installed and used an oos master boot loader.
Yeah, I recall similar incidents many years ago. I don't recall the 
details, but wasn't there some HW/BIOS limitation (LBA?) ?

At least I haven't seen this happening for ca. a decade.

> my partitioning was similar to what you show, with a swap for each distrib,
> but only 1 master boot partition.
This will only work if the distros sharing their boot partition are 
similar enough and if these distros do not change their bootloaders.

History tells, you can get away with such a set up for some time, but in 
longer terms, one distro will trash the others' setup.

Ralf