sharing /boot among multible Linux distros

[Chris Murphy]

On Nov 26, 2013, at 3:18 PM, Michael Schwendt <mschwendt at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 26 Nov 2013 17:00:35 -0500, Javier Perez wrote:
> 
>> In theory, Ubuntu and Fedora will have their own partitions inside the SDD.
>> My question is, can I share the /boot partition between Fedora and Ubuntu?
>> both are using Grub2. Right now I have two /boot partitions (one on each
>> HDD) and it is a pain. 
> 
> That's because your setup is wrong. If I were you, I would install a
> bootloader into the boot sector of each of your /boot partitions and
> chainload them from your MBR.

This isn't recommended by upstream, and isn't supported by anaconda. So it requires a different installer touching the disk last, or manually issuing grub(2)-install --force. It's better to use extlinux for this use case though.

> [Alternatively, since both are GRUB2, you
> can let the primary grub.conf menu load a grub.conf from a secondary OS.]

That's a better option. But Fedora grub should probably be used, as it seems the syntax of grub2 cfg files changes, and the newest version of grub installed as the bootloader can read either configfile.


Chris Murphy