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

[Andrew M.A. Cater]

On Wed, Oct 29, 2003 at 06:11:03PM +0000, 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?
> 
I've done this before now and it works, at least as far as Lilo is 
concerned.

Install Debian on hdb using your current disks.  Make sure that Lilo
installs itself in /dev/hdb.

You are going to use Lilo to chain load another disk.

On /dev/hda1, edit the "other" stanza in /etc/lilo.conf to read /dev/hdb

Rerun Lilo on /dev/hda.

You should see /dev/hdb be added as an option.

Boot to /dev/hdb and add your first disk to the "other" option as 
/dev/hda [Just in case you pick the wrong one :) ]  Rerun Lilo on
/dev/hdb and you're done.


> I've questioned the developers on the matter and basically no-one appears to 
> have tried running demudi with testing[Sarge]. The idea being that I keep my 
> nice stable-but-out-of-fashion Woody on hda and install testing on hdb and 
> might as well go for demudi/devel in my sources.list and then ponder deeply 
> the meaning of 'broken dependecies' :-]
> Point is it won't matter too much if I can't get it all to work at once and I 
> daresay I could copy the configurations over directly from the existing ones.
> 
> This way I will still be able to boot back to hda and email the developers to 
> tell them what works & what doesn't. They say they'd love to know.
> 
> 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?

Difficult: as an alternative, you _might_ be able to install 
testing/unstable in either a chroot or a User Mode Linux environment.  
Not necessarily straightforward to set up: if you've two disks, then 
it's probably far easier to use both like this.  Obviously, if you're 
running off /dev/hdb, there's nothing to stop you manually mounting 
/dev/hda to get some files off, for example, or vice versa.
> 
> I look forward to any constructive comments, suggestions or voices of 
> experience on double booting this way.
> 
HTH,

Andy