[Lancaster] 'Sharing' a /boot Partition - Possible?

[Ken Hough]

On Friday 27 February 2009 23:28:36 Dave Smith wrote:
> Evening again folks.
>
> Another bordering-on-dumb question here I fear.
>
> Two Linux / Unix OS's. One hard drive. What happens if you make them
> both mount the same /boot partition to store their grub config in?
>
> I'm sure I remember Ken mentioning something in this area fairly
> recently when he was talking about his own machines, but I can't
> remember the details. Once again, search results seem sketchy. Perhaps I
> need to go back and define my searches better...
>
> For reference, I'm toying with Ubuntu in one spot, Debian Lenny in
> another, both referring to the same /boot and swap for - I think, in
> theory - ease.
>
> Am I right? Wrong? In need of a good slap?
>
> :) Best,
>
> Dave
>

Hi Dave,

I do have a fairly complicated partition setup on my main desktop PC  -- three 
primary partitons and a logical/extended partition. In all there are 11 
partitions. I like to play.  :-)

Partition number 1 contains Win XP, but enough said of that. I don't use it 
much.

I don't share a boot partition between distros! I expect that could lead to 
problems.   :-(

I have separate boot partitions for all of Linux installs that I set up which 
presently amounts to only 64bit SUSE v11.1 and 32 bit Fedora v10. Typically I 
go for 3 partitions per distro. ie /boot, /, and /home.

At one stage, I did use a common /home partiton, but no longer do this.

My bootloader sits on the boot record of the SUSE /boot partition, well away 
from the master boot record, so that Win XP/Setup won't overwrite it.

For most tryouts that I do now, I use VirtualBox v2.1.2

Regards

Ken Hough