dual boot test

[Chris Murphy]

On Dec 27, 2013, at 1:48 PM, bruce <badouglas at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Chris,
> 
> For my tests right now, I'm simply trying to get dual Centos up/running,

OK but why do it the hard way, instead of putting one of them in a VM? Or better, Fedora 20, and put two CentOS and another Fedora each in their own VM? In that case you don't have to deal with the esoteric, user hostile, world of bootloaders on Linux. You can just get to booting multiple OS's. And they boot faster.

The only reason for dual booting I can think of is expressly to learn about the challenges of getting bootloaders to do dual booting.

> Based on what you've said, there are errors in what I'm trying to
> accomplish. You wouldn't have a few mins to walk me through this would
> you.

It's a lot more than that I can assure you. It took me more time than I care to admit, and if I could get that time back from the life blood sucking experience it was, I'd probably do that.

remove "hidemenu" so you can see the menu, and duplicate the two entries, changing just the one thing that matters which is the menu entry name, and the root. You do not need separate swaps either.


hidemenu
title Centos (2.6.32-431.e16.x86_64)
   root (hd0,0)
   kernel /vmlinux-2.6.32-431.e16.x86_64 ro
root=/dev/mapper/VolGroup-lv_root rd_NO_LUKS LANG=en_US.UTF-8 rd_NO_MD
rd_LVM_LV=VolGroup/lv_swap SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16
rd_LVM_LV=VolGroup/lv_root  KEYBOARDTYPE=pc KEYTABLE=us rd_NO_DM rhgb
quiet
 initrd /initramfs-2.6.32-431.e16.x86_64.img

title Centos2 (2.6.32-431.e16.x86_64)
   root (hd0,0)   kernel /vmlinux-2.6.32-431.e16.x86_64 ro
root=/dev/mapper/VolGroup-lv2_root rd_NO_LUKS LANG=en_US.UTF-8 rd_NO_MD
rd_LVM_LV=VolGroup/lv_swap SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16
rd_LVM_LV=VolGroup/lv2_root  KEYBOARDTYPE=pc KEYTABLE=us rd_NO_DM rhgb
quiet
 initrd /initramfs-2.6.32-431.e16.x86_64.img

> 
> I'm convinced that this is doable, and that whatever mistakes I've
> made are probably subtle/easy to correct.
> 
> Do you happen to know of a good tutorial for this that walks through
> all the steps.

Not really. It's the domain of bad documentation designed for developers, not users. I learned what I learned via immense suffering and blunt contact.


Chris Murphy