Two Linux installations on one disk

**anton** · June 11th, 2008

I'd like to create a partition on my hard disk to play around with other Linux distro's. Is there a SAFE newbie-friendly way of doing this without screwing up my existing Ubuntu installation? Or should I rather buy an additional hard disk?

**Habbit** · June 11th, 2008

It mostly depends on what the other distro does. You could damage your Ubuntu installation in two possible ways:

Overwriting its partitions. Just make sure the new distro installer does not try to format anything it should not
Screwing up the bootloader. Avoiding this may be a bit trickier. If the GRUB installation set up by Ubuntu is in the MBR (hd0), then set the new GRUB at a safe place like your new root's boot sector i.e. (hd0,5) or whatever. You may have some problems chainloading each other, but you'll most probably work it out without causing havoc.

A distro I like tinkering with is Gentoo, since it as a completely "do-it-yourself" installation and does not force you to install a bootloader - I had it side-by-side with Ubuntu for a long time and there were absolutely no problems.

**Pumalite** · June 11th, 2008

Is your Ubuntu ia a primary or logical partition. Post a screenshot of gparted

**anton** · June 11th, 2008

Thanks, both of you. I've decided to not do this for now -- I've just added KDE to Ubuntu, and that gives me enough variety!

What I am considering is adding Vista to my Windows drive, i.e. so that I have both XP and Vista on one disk and Ubuntu on the other disk. Can I do that without messing up Grub or, alternatively, restore Grub once Vista is installed?