Installing 3 distro's on same drive.

Doug dmcgarrett at optonline.net
Tue Apr 19 20:39:46 UTC 2011


On 04/19/2011 02:21 PM, Lucio M Nicolosi wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 11:55 AM, Johan Scheepers
> <johansche at telkomsa.net>  wrote:
>> Good day,
>>
>> If I intend to install 3 distro's on one drive, but would like to find out
>> if it is possible / feasible ?
>>
>> Make 4 partitions on drive.
>>
>> Should they be all primary. I understand linux can handle that?
>>
>> For instance..
>>
>> First partition..        Ubuntu
>> second partition..    Fedora
>> third partition..        Centos
>> fourth partition..      Swap.
>>
>> Now..should I install them in that sequence then Centos would control the
>> MBR ?
>>
>> So now what happens when ..  say I replace  any of the first 2 with
>> another/later distro ?
>>
>> What can be done should the MBR go bad to boot the distro'S.
>>
>> Some advice will be appreciated
>> Thanks
>> Johan S
> Perhaps a Grub dedicated partition would do, just like:
>
> http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/grub/grubpartition.htm
I have XP plus 4 Linux distros on one drive on this machine (Dell laptop)
that I'm writing to you on.  XP is on sda1, pclos on sda5 and 7, and the
others on higher order partitions, all of them after XP, as you can see
from the numbers, are extended.  The grub booter from pclos controls
everything.  (The Ubuntu booter doesn't work right for multiple partitions:
it tends to put in a separate boot line for each partition, not for each /.
Also, it's ugly, it's not GUI.)  I only know about the pclos booter, which
works nicely; you could try one of the others that you want to load and
see how it works.  You can only have four primary partitions, but quite
a few extended on one primary. sda5 and so on are on the 2nd primary.
(Windows likes a primary--I don't know how it would take to an
extended. It also likes to be first.)

[doug at localhost ~]$ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on         OS
/dev/sda5              12G  3.9G  7.4G  35% /                        
      pclos
/dev/sda7              11G  574M   10G   6% /home                   pclos
/dev/sda9              33G  176M   32G   1% /media/disk           Debian
/dev/sda8              28G  5.5G   21G  21% /media/disk-1        Debian
/dev/sda13             46G  3.1G   41G   8% /media/disk-2        MINT
/dev/sda11             33G  2.8G   29G   9% /media/disk-3        Ubuntu
/dev/sda10             20G  4.6G   15G  25% /media/disk-4       XP
/dev/sda1              31G   20G   11G  64% /media/disk-5        Ubuntu

--doug

-- 
Blessed are the peacemakers...for they shall be shot at from both sides. --A. M. Greeley





More information about the ubuntu-users mailing list