On Thu, 10 Jan 2008 13:09:40 -0500, I Beartooth wrote:
... I want to install CentOS 5.1 again, Ubuntu 7.10, and Fedora 8.
(If I were doing it all over, perhaps I should do the partitioning first and separately, with knoppix or gparted, or with qtparted if that has a live cd. Maybe I should Dban the whole shebang, and repartition first anyway ...)
Well, I did it; I wish I knew more exactly *how* I did it. I'll outline it, and maybe one of the gurux here can generalize and polish it into a real recipe.
I did DBAN the whole hard drive before anything else.
I *think* I'll be safer to install Ubuntu first, and with the GUI .iso, *not* with the text-install, which I lack the savvy to use.
Previous failures taught me the reverse. I installed CentOS first, with manual partitioning, creating a /boot partition, a main one for C5, and a swap partition -- leaving the rest of the space free, iirc. When I got it through firstboot, I did a little minimal configuring, to have a usable desktop and a couple of things I expected to use, such as gparted a/o qtparted.
Then I installed F8, again with manual partitioning.
When I got it through firstboot and another minimal configuration, I rebooted another time. Sure enough, booting to C5 now failed.
So I set up a gnome terminal with two tabs each su'd to root, and another workspace with gparted running -- not doing anything, just looking.
I opened F8's /etc/grub.conf with a text editor on one root tab; on the other, I did "mkdir /TEST" followed by "mount -t ext3 /dev/sdax / TEST"
Then cd /TEST, followed by ls and cd some more, till I got to a grub.conf or a menu.lst
(NB:you have to use sd in F8, where you'd use hd in C5 or U7; start with x = 1, and keep looking till you can see from the file names that you're in the one for C5; there is no space between the third / and TEST.) At that point, with c&p between the tabs, I cloned an entry for C5 into the configuration for F8.
Then I cd'd out of the mounted partition, unmounted it, and rebooted to make sure. Now C5 and F8 did both boot successfully.
So I installed U7, again with manual partitioning; it insisted, as the others had not, on making an extra partition -- God knows why. I bit my fingernails, and kept going.
After the install, to no surprise on my part, I could boot to both F8 and U7, but C5 had disappeared.
Now comes a (probably evitable) heresy.
I booted to U7's rescue, or minimal, or whatever; got to the root prompt at the end of it; commanded "passwd" and gave it a root password; and rebooted into regular U7.
Now I could again set two terminal tabs to root.
Those of you actually comfortable with sudoing, and not worried about timing out while you study things at length, may want to skip the heretical root password.
Again I launched gparted (which I had had to get from synaptic) to look with -- and this time mounted both U7's own partition and one of the others. (I had to do it that way, because I didn't find a way to simply cd from root to what turned out to be /boot/grub/menu.lst; but with U7's partition once mounted under /root, I could edit it.)
Now I got to the bottom of menu.lst, below the F8 entry which I knew worked; and copied/cloned an entry for C5 onto the bottom of it.
When I got back out of everything, lo and behold!, all three OSs did boot successfully.
... does anyone know of an example somewhere of a grub.conf, for a machine running three linuces, which I can manage to clone once I do get all three installed?
I never found one. I'm not completely sure where the one that works is, but I believe (once I finish customizing) I'll be able to get to it and post it or email it, if anyone asks.