[CentOS] Slightly OT: Dual-booting two Linux dists

[Frank Cox]

On Wed, 09 Jan 2008 15:03:39 -0800
Bart Schaefer <barton.schaefer at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm only planning to dual-boot while I determine which operating
> system to leave on the machine permanently.  I don't want Xen masking
> interactions with the hardware in a way that might give different
> results from the actual behavior of each OS on the raw machine.

I set up a machine that booted 4 different Centos installations the other day.

All you have to do is tell the installer that you want to do a custom
partitioning scheme, then point it to /dev/sda or /dev/sdb or whatever, and
tell it to use X amount of the space on that drive.  Don't install the boot
loader on anything but the first install, then add the new partitions/setups
manually to grub.conf as you create them.

I found it easiest to not use a /boot partition though there is probably a way
to do it with one as well.

Here is the grub.conf that I ended up with on my 4-way booting machine:

# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE:  You do not have a /boot partition.  This means that
#          all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /, eg.
#          root (hd0,0)
#          kernel /boot/vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/sda1
#          initrd /boot/initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/sda
default=0
timeout=5
splashimage=(hd0,0)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title HomeComputer (2.6.18-53.1.4.el5PAE)
        root (hd0,0)
        kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-53.1.4.el5PAE ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet
        initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.18-53.1.4.el5PAE.img
title AnsweringMachine
        root (hd0,3)
        kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-53.1.4.el5PAE ro root=/dev/sda4 rhgb quiet
        initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.18-53.1.4.el5PAE.img
title ApplicationServer
        root (hd1,0)
        kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-53.1.4.el5PAE ro root=/dev/sdb1 rhgb quiet
        initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.18-53.1.4.el5PAE.img
title WebServer
        root (hd1,1)
        kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-53.1.4.el5PAE ro root=/dev/sdb2 rhgb quiet
        initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.18-53.1.4.el5PAE.img


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