[wellylug] Patitioning for multi OS'

[Lyndsay Mountfort]

Hi Rob

I run Debian and RedHat from the same drive - well actually I haven't 
actively run RedHat in a few months, but could if I wished!

I installed Debian last from CDs by trashing and reusing an existing 
NTFS partition :) , and when in the partitioning tool just created the 
new partition, told it where to mount that ( / ), to mount the existing 
swap partition, and also to add the RedHat partitions under /RedHat for 
convenience. Later on I was able to figure out Lilo well enough to get 
interactive booting to either distro. I'm no expert, but the install was 
perfectly straight-forward, and the Lilo bit just a little harder.

Just don't forget to make boot floppies for both each installation as 
you do it in case it all turns pear-shaped! Oh and if you must have 
window$ then install it first (maybe after using a Linux disk to create 
suitable partitions) so that your various Linuxes can detect it and baby 
it through the multiple-boot stuff.

A nice extra is using symlinks so that whichever partition I boot I 
still get transparent access to my Mozilla mail and settings (same idea 
for other apps too):

in /home/lyndsay on the Debian partition
.mozilla -> /RedHat/home/lyndsay/.mozilla  

- created before running mozilla for the first time.

Someone more expert than me may have more to say, but it all worked fine 
for me.

Lyndsay


Rob Giltrap - Ubiety Group wrote:

> I have just ordered my new 80GB hard disk from Paradigm PC's and are 
> now thinking about how best to partition it.
>
> My requirements are:
>
> 1 * Win98 - Stable
> 1 * Linux - Stable
> 1 (or maybe 2) * Linux - Muck around test environment
>
> I am a little unclear how to properly seperate the two linux 
> environments.
>
> I would appreciate it on what is the best way to set this up and what 
> gotchas I need to look out for. I intend to just run on the one HDD to 
> keep noise to a minimum.
>
> Thanks, Rob.
>
>