[Gllug] Dual booting different CentOS versions over multiple HDs

[Richard Jones]

On Sun, Feb 10, 2008 at 09:12:37PM +0000, Martyn Drake wrote:
> It's been a while since I've tried this - but can I assume it's safe
> to install CentOS 5 on a second, clean SATA hard drive alongside an
> existing CentOS 4 installation on the first and amend (assuming that
> Kickstart isn't intelligent enough to figure out there's an already
> existing installation) the Grub configuration accordingly to dual boot
> between CentOS 4 on the first drive and CentOS 5 on the second?  In
> theory I believe this should just work out the box, but I seem to
> recall when I last tried something like this there were some gotchas
> that caught me out in terms of the MBR.

I did RHEL 4 & Fedora 8 over the weekend [I'm planning a multi-boot
box with probably 4 or 5 parallel operating systems installed] and
that pair seems to work.

I installed RHEL first, creating a 1 GB /boot partition and an LVM PV
covering the remainder of the disk.  I gave RHEL two LVs, Swap and
RHEL4Root leaving plenty of free space in the PV for future OS
installs.  After this I installed Fedora, being very careful to select
manual disk partitioning, and let it use the _existing_ /boot
partition and (shared) Swap LV but giving it a fresh F8Root LV.  This
is fine but I had to go back and edit /boot/grub/grub.conf after the
install to add back the RHEL4 boot option.  (I've now saved this
grub.conf somewhere else because it'll get trashed by further installs
and upgrades).

The machine I'm experimenting with is 32 bit, but eventually I'm going
to do this on a 64 bit machine and install 32 and 64 bit OSes in
parallel.  That one will have at least 9 OSes: Windows, RHEL 4 & 5
(i386 and x86-64) and Fedora 8 & Rawhide (i386 and x86-64) and
possibly one or two Debians.  I'm expecting a problem with conflicting
kernel and initrd names because they have the same name for the i386
and x86-64 variants.  Not exactly sure at the moment how to manage
that ... two /boot partitions ...?

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat
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