[Lugstuff] How to question

[Thomas Gallen]

Good (rainy) afternoon,

I just unplug unrelated drives when installing different operating
systems, then plug them all back in afterwards. Firstly, this saves you
from the Windows habit of setting up it's own bootloader over top of
another one. Secondly, this means that each drive is it's own
independent installation with it's own bootloader. As a result, if the
primary drive with the primary GRUB bootloader dies, each drive can
still boot on it's own and saves you a bunch of time (though really it's
just an easy way to keep things separated without much cruft).

You have 2 options for booting such a setup:
1.) Using the BIOS disk selection menu (if available).
2.) Installing grub on the primary boot disk and creating entries for
each installation.

Windows will already have to be chainloaded, however, your GNU/Linux
installations can go one of two ways:

1.) Chainload the existing bootloader (easier).
2.) Directly boot the existing installation (a bit more advanced).

If you go with chainloading then you're just having the primary GRUB
bootloader call another bootloader. If you set that bootloader to not
display a menu/have a timeout of 0 then the extra time to load the next
bootloader is nothing notable.

If you directly load the installation you won't have to call an
additional bootloader but this requires knowledge of all boot settings
of all other GNU/Linux installations on the system. Instead of
chainloading you'd have to know the kernel argument line, boot
partition, if it uses init RAM disks, etc. It'll be quicker, but
maintenance will be bothersome especially since most friendly
distributions like to handle these things themselves and could break
your entry at any time with an update.

Lastly, you do have another option and that would be to let the installations
duke it out in proper order and let Windows installations take turns
wiping the boot record of the primary disk, however, I being the lazy
man that I am, do the above.

Hope this gives you some ideas.
Thomas

On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 11:03:26AM -0400, David F Bleil wrote:
> I intend to install a 3rd SATA HD on my computer.
> 
> 1st hard drive Windows XP PRO 32 bit
> 
> 2nd Hard drive currently has  SUSE 9.3  32 bit. I  WILL change to 64 BIT Suse 
> 11.1 after installing the additional Win XP Pro 64 bit OS. The Suse install 
> finds the other partitions and askes me which one I want to use.
> 
> I want to install this drive and make the OS system on the NEW DRIVE
> 3rd Hard Drive  XP Pro 64 bit
> 
> What procedure should I use to install the SUSE 64 bit [2nd hard drive] and
> the XP Pro 64 bit[3rd hard drive]
> I DO NOT WANT TO LOOSE THE XP PRO 32 BIT PROGRAM AND DATA.  Do I have to 
> remove the drive, plug the new drive as primary and install the XP Pro 64 bit 
> as a new installation or is there a way to make sure that the Windows 64 bit 
> will go on the third drive? If I do this will the GRUB boot manager be hosed?
> 
> I am relaying this request to the LUG on behalf of a friend who is new to 
> Linux and multiple boot systems in general. I would appreciate any 
> observations, warnings , tips which would be applicable to this project.
> 
> He has the correct hardware for using 64 bit software.
> 4 GB Ram
> Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Conroe 2.4GHz 4M shared L2 Cache LGA 775 65W
> Dual-Core Processo
> 
> Thanks for your assistance.
> 
> -- 
> 
> David F. Bleil
> 
> SUSE Linux 11.1
> This penguin can fly!
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