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Re: [LUG] A sorry disc tale



Neil Williams wrote:

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I reckoned that the time had finally come to cash in on the 6Gb of unused
space on the M$ partition on the workstation - thinking that 3Gb could be
assigned as a real test bed, try SuSE, Sorcerer, Slackware, Lycoris, anything
else on the LXF DVD's I've collected and then eventually Debian at which
point I might stick.

Easy I thought. Scandisk and defrag the M$ FAT32, load Mandrake 8.1 and
diskdrake, shave 3Gb off the FAT and reboot.

Yeah. right.

Any guesses what was missed in that process?

I meant to ask this question on the LUG a while ago:
If M$ is on hda1 and Mandrake on hda3 (hda4 as swap), what happens if I slap a
3Gb partition IN THE MIDDLE! Oops.

I get a kernel panic, that's what happens. Failed at 03:03

If I hadn't found an old boot floppy, would there have been any way of
mounting what was hda3 across the network? It turned out to be denoted as
hda6, with hda7 as swap. I finally got in using boot> linux single
root=/dev/hda6

After editing /etc/lilo.conf to change the root permanently, then running lilo
to action the change, I still didn't get a working system - diskdrake had
edited /etc/fstab and I hadn't formatted the new 3Gb partition. Oops again.
So when /etc/fstab was read, the init failed.

Another visit to the boot floppy to remove the line for /dev/hda3, start the
system, back into diskdrake to format the new 3Gb partition, and it can be
mounted properly!

Now, one question.

If I install Slackware, Debian, Lycoris, etc. on this 3Gb, can they use the
EXISTING swap partition (now hda7) or do I have to do more fiddling with
diskdrake and create another swap partition? After all, only one Linux distro
will be running at a time.

I think you should be able to use the same swap partition for both
distros, remember to add the appropriate entry to the appropriate
/etc/fstab. For example:

/dev/hda7 swap swap defaults 0 0 

Another problem I had with two distros was with Lilo/Grub. If you need
to use a different kernel for each distro make sure all the kernels (and
any ram disk images) are in /boot of the distro you are about to run
lilo or grub configuration on. Then add the entries to /etc/lilo.conf or
/boot/grub/menu.lst.

-- 
Andrew Rogers
http://www.rogerstech.co.uk

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