[Westwales] Dual Boot?

[Dick Bain]

Robert Savage wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> Have they caught the MS disease of intentionally ignoring other O/Ss?
> 
> I recently partitioned a spare 10GB into two ext2fs partitions (4.5GB each  
> roughly) and a 512MB swap partition.  On hda1 I installed Fedora Core 2 and 
> on hda3 Mandrake 10.0, both from the Linux Format Magazine front cover DVDs, 
> hda2 is the swap partition.
> 
> Fedora Core was installed first and used 'grub' as the boot loader, Mandrake 
> 10 was then installed and then the fun started. Neither distribution will 
> recognise the other's partitions so I can't make the system dual boot.  
> modifying grub and adding Mandrake's root and boot directory results in a 
> message: Error 23: Error while parsing number.....  
> 
> Can someone please tell me how to get them to see each other so I can dual 
> boot without having to use a third party application (Smartboot Manager) to 
> bring them up?

appended is my /etc/lilo.conf file which works when I am booting with 
two distros and windblows.
there are ways of getting two to see each others root system but I would 
be very wary of doing that myself.
oh and remember to run lilo once you've edited the conf file from 
whichever distro it is, Mandy has a utility in drakconf which is pretty 
much point and click, but editing the file and running lilo is all that 
the graphic front end is doing

Dick

# File generated by DrakX/drakboot
# WARNING: do not forget to run lilo after modifying this file

boot=/dev/hda
map=/boot/map
default="linux"
keytable=/boot/uk.klt
prompt
nowarn
timeout=100
message=/boot/message
menu-scheme=wb:bw:wb:bw
image=/boot/vmlinuz
	label="linux"
	root=/dev/hdb1
	initrd=/boot/initrd.img
	append="devfs=mount acpi=ht resume=/dev/hdb5 splash=silent"
	vga=788
	read-only
image=/boot/vmlinuz
	label="linux-nonfb"
	root=/dev/hdb1
	initrd=/boot/initrd.img
	append="devfs=mount acpi=ht resume=/dev/hdb5"
	read-only
image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.3-7mdk
	label="263-7"
	root=/dev/hdb1
	initrd=/boot/initrd-2.6.3-7mdk.img
	append="devfs=mount acpi=ht resume=/dev/hdb5 splash=silent"
	read-only
image=/boot/vmlinuz
	label="failsafe"
	root=/dev/hdb1
	initrd=/boot/initrd.img
	append="failsafe acpi=ht resume=/dev/hdb5 devfs=nomount"
	read-only
other=/dev/hda1
	label="windows"
	table=/dev/hda
other=/dev/fd0
	label="floppy"
	unsafe
other=/dev/hda8
	label="Slackware"