[Glastonbury] Boot on the other Drive [was: Downgrading with apt-get]

[Damon Chaplin]

On Wed, 2003-10-29 at 18:11, tim hall wrote:
> Hello again,
> 
> I've been doing a bit more research and pondering about this business of 
> upgrading my Debian installation:
> 
> On Wednesday 24 September 2003 20:06, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:
> > It may be worth living more on the bleeding edge, potentially, not least
> > because the newer kernels have security fixes.  "Testing" / Sarge would
> > be a hard upgrade over a dial-up, but I can potentially burn you the
> > CD's and send them via Martin - that's about 11 cds.  apt-cdrom add
> > would then add them to your list and you could apt-get update ; apt-get
> > dist-upgrade from them.
> 
> I think I'm ready to take you up on your offer now Andy.
> 
> I'm thinking of double-booting. I've got my existing Debian/Woody on hda 
> [10GB Maxtor] and I've got a 20GB Seagate[mumble] on hdb.
> 
> Can I boot from hdb using LILO?

Yes, it should be fairly easy to set up. I dual-boot Windows & Linux,
and used to have several versions of Linux on different
disks/partitions.

If you install Debian on hdb it might even set it all up for you.
RedHat sets up dual-booting for me.

Just make sure you don't format hda! (Backup important stuff first.)
And create a boot disk first so you can still boot if it gets messed up.



> Is it possible to do this with runlevels, say runlevel 2 runs the hda Woody 
> system and runlevel 5 runs hdb Demudi? Is this possible/desirable?

I don't think it is possible/desirable. I don't think you can switch
kernels or file-system layouts (e.g. between hda and hdb) when you
switch runlevels.

Why would you want to do that? To avoid rebooting?

Damon