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On Tuesday 05 April 2005 11:10 pm, Martinus Scriblerus wrote:
Hi. I'm quite new to Linux, though in a previous existence I was a Unix user and did some routine administration on workstations - HP and Sun.
Your main task will be relating to the boot loaders - Lilo in your case. Read the manpages thoroughly.
I've been experimenting with Linux distros on my laptop. I have Mandrake 10.1 dual booting with lilo, but I would like to load another distro into some spare disc space for comparison. Is this possible/feasible/trivial?
Possible, feasible, not quite trivial, depending on your config. Mandrake does a lot of this for you, partitioning etc. You'll need to create a new partition (locally, not externally) to receive the next distro. It's perfectly possible, I had 12 distributions over 2 internal hard drives at one time, it just takes a little organisation and a willingness to read the lilo.conf manpage.
I've tried installing Suse 9.2. It happily found itself a suitable place in a partition on my external HD
That may not be ideal. Try setting up a new partition using the Mandrake tools and then install SuSE there. Or Debian, Fedora or any one of two dozen others.
- fair enough. It then installed grub
Grub + LILO = panic. One will replace the other. What you want is for the new install to recognise LILO and add itself to that. Fedora and Debian will probably do that. SuSE might if you tweak it but I haven't used it enough.
but failed to boot from it. Is there a problem with it being on the external HD?
Booting from an external HD is always tricky - it can rely far too heavily on the mysteries of BIOS support.
I returned to using lilo to control the boot process and tried to add an entry for Suse 9.2. Not sure if I set up the mount point correctly - I must have a more thorough investigation tomorrow.
/boot is the usual area for consideration. When I had all those distros, I created a separate (small) partition for /boot and when I had a new install, I mounted that read-write and copied the /boot from the new install into a sub-directory of the 'real' /boot. So on the new system (say Fedora), I'd mount the 'real' /boot at /mnt/boot then: # cp -pr /boot /mnt/boot/fedora Unmount /mnt/boot and reboot into the first install (this is the only one that can write the MBR properly at this stage). edit the lilo.conf on /boot to reflect the new image added to /boot/fedora re-run lilo to update the MBR. Now reboot and fedora appears in the menu and should boot. However, this is old and from memory so it's only an outline. I tested each distro, compared the ease of upgrade and settled on Debian. One by one each partition has been swallowed by Debian and I never reboot now. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.dcglug.org.uk/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/isbnsearch/ http://www.neil.williamsleesmill.me.uk/ http://www.biglumber.com/x/web?qs=0x8801094A28BCB3E3
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