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lewisskinner
January 9th, 2009, 03:34 AM
Hi all, and a Happy New year to everyone!

I have a multi-boot system, with Vista and Ubuntu on Primary partitions, and an extended partition consisting of 4 ext3 partitions, for testing OSs (these are reformatted as necessary, ie to UFS, Reiser, XFS etc). I also have a small (1MB) partition for GRUB.

My hope, is that I can install Ubuntu mounting sda2 as /boot/grub, and then if (when) I install a third OS, can take a copy of the sources.list file, install the new OS (again mounting sda2 as /boot/grub) and then merge the two sources.list files, however, when I tried to install 8.10, I got an error.

Here is my partition table by the way, including the mount points I attempted to use:

Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x6d242da1

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 33192 266614708+ 7 HPFS/NTFS /windows
/dev/sda2 33193 33193 1024 83 Linux /boot/grub (note, this is formatted as ext2)
/dev/sda3 33193 52773 157283358+ 83 Linux / (root)
/dev/sda4 52774 60801 64484910 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 52774 54927 17301973+ 83 Linux unmounted
/dev/sda6 54928 56885 15727603+ 83 Linux unmounted
/dev/sda7 56886 58843 15727603+ 83 Linux unmounted
/dev/sda8 58844 60801 15727603+ 83 Linux unmounted

Disk /dev/sdb: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000d7afc

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 1 653 5245191 b W95 FAT32 unmounted
/dev/sdb2 654 1306 5245222+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris SWAP
/dev/sdb3 1307 61454 483138810 7 HPFS/NTFS /shared
/dev/sdb4 61455 121601 483130777+ 83 Linux /home

Any ideas?

logos34
January 9th, 2009, 04:13 AM
My hope, is that I can install Ubuntu mounting sda2 as /boot/grub, and then if (when) I install a third OS, can take a copy of the sources.list file, install the new OS (again mounting sda2 as /boot/grub) and then merge the two sources.list files, however, when I tried to install 8.10, I got an error.

Any ideas?

Not sure exactly what happened during installation of 8.10, but if you're just making Grub (not full /boot) partition on sda2 (and 1 MB should be enough for the contents of /boot/grub), then you don't even need to point the ubiquity installer to it--just indicate /, /swap and /home.

After you reboot follow this guide (http://users.bigpond.net.au/hermanzone/p15.htm#How_to_make_a_separate_Grub_Partition_) to making a so-called 'dedicated grub partition.' (Basically you just copy grub files, reinstall bootloader pointing to it and add line to fstab).

Then you can add entries to chainload other OSs, or use configfile (http://users.bigpond.net.au/hermanzone/p15.htm#1._Configfile)method.

lewisskinner
January 9th, 2009, 04:52 AM
Ah! That looks very sensible!

I'll have a go at that and report back

lewisskinner
February 28th, 2009, 03:29 AM
Ah! That looks very sensible!

I'll have a go at that and report back

This works - thanks very much for the pointer!