This document outlines an installation technique to simplify booting multiple operating systems.
Making Room
If you have an operating system already installed and using the entire disk, you may first need to resize that disk partition to make room for other operating systems. This is common if your system comes pre-installed with Windows and you would like to keep that software installed. For tips see http://docs.fedoraproject.org/install-guide/f10/en_US/sn-disk-druid.html.
Install Additional Operating Systems
With the native operating system resized, install as many operating systems as you wish. However, do not install the bootloader to the master boot record (MBR). Instead, be sure to install the boot loader to each '/boot' partition.
Configure the MBR
Create a small partition which will be configured to chainload all installed operating systems. For this example, we'll use /dev/sda7.
- Install grub to
/dev/sda7
- grub
- root (hd0,6)
- setup (hd0)
- Configure grub to boot Rawhide
/dev/sda6
, Fedora/dev/sda3
and Windows/dev/sda1
. Not your partitions will likely differ.- default=0
- timeout=5
- hiddenmenu
- title Rawhide
- rootnoverify (hd0,5)
- chainloader +1
- boot
- title Fedora
- rootnoverify (hd0,2)
- makeactive
- chainloader +1
- boot
- title Windows XP
- rootnoverify (hd0,0)
- chainloader +1
Reboot With Confidence
You now have a setup with multiple operating systems, each with it's own bootloader configuration. This makes upgrading kernels and re-installing easier (providing you do not replace the MBR).
Appendix
My current partition scheme
# parted /dev/sda -s p Model: ATA HTS541060G9AT00 (scsi) Disk /dev/sda: 60.0GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: msdos Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 1 32.3kB 10.7GB 10.7GB primary ntfs 3 10.7GB 10.8GB 107MB primary ext3 boot 4 10.8GB 55.8GB 44.9GB extended 5 10.8GB 55.6GB 44.7GB logical lvm 6 55.6GB 55.7GB 107MB logical ext3 7 55.7GB 55.8GB 107MB logical ext3 2 55.8GB 60.0GB 4242MB primary fat32 lba