Dual booting with Ubuntu 8.04

[basilwatson]

Hi all

I would like to dual boot 9.10 with 8.04

The reason , I use some Engineering software which I am having difficulty installing

So there is a Live CD CAELINUX which is already good to go

But it uses 8.04 and I had a lot of problems getting that to work with my hardware ( bluetooth mouse )

So

I have partitioned my HD but when I try to install 8.04 I cant install grub correctly so either I get 9.10 OR 8.04

And then theres EXT4 ...

How can I do this ( dual boot with 8.04

Stephen

[iniesta]

I have a similar question. I want to triple boot 3 OSes: Ubuntu 8.04, Ubuntu 9.10 and Windows XP. I have already installed Ubuntu 8.04 and Windows XP. If now I install another OS (Ubuntu 9.10) is there any problem?

Thanks!

[ShadowMage]

Hi,

I'm sure there are other ways to do it, but on one of my comps I have 3 OS (Ubuntu 9.10 + Ubuntu 9.04 + Windows XP) and here is what I did:

First, I had a dual boot of Ubuntu 9.04 / Windows XP. Then to install Ubuntu 9.10, I first played around with my partitions using a GParted Live CD (which can be created from an iso downloaded from GParted Homepage (http://gparted.sourceforge.net/) - currently the latest stable "Live" version is 0.4.8-6 (http://sourceforge.net/projects/gparted/files/gparted-live-stable/0.4.8-6/)) so that I could put 9.10 in the same extended partition as 9.04, in order to share the swap partition.

NOTE: Just to be clear, what I did was I put it beside the old Ubuntu's partition in the same extended partition. Overwriting the old Ubuntu's actual ext3 (or whatever the case may be) partition would obviously destroy it!

During installation, I selected the "Specify partitions manually (advanced)" option. I formatted the unallocated space I had created inside this extended partition (personally I used ext3) for mounting "/" for 9.10, and by default I believe it recognized the swap and was already selected to be used. Of course, do not format your old Ubuntu partition (or the swap), since you want to keep it!

This worked for me. Not entirely the same situation, but I hope it helps anyway.

Cheers.

[iniesta]

Hi ShadowMage,

Thank you very much for your answer. Your method is a good solution. However, since my hard disk has been partitioned as follow:

+ /dev/sda1: Ubuntu 8.04
+ /dev/sda2: Linux Swap
+ /dev/sda3: Windows XP
+ unallocated: ~50GB

(The above 3 partitions are all primary)

And now I want to install Ubuntu 9.10 on the unallocated space. In this case, I intend to choose the option "Use the largest continuous free space". But the thing I wonder is: what will the 9.10's installation do to my hard disk? To be more specific, will it create another Linux Swap partition? Will the 'only 4 primary partitions at the most' law be violated? And to be short, will it be ok to do so?

Thanks and regards,

Iniesta.

[ShadowMage]

Hmm, I see. Well I think it should still be possible to tell it to use the same swap if you choose "Specify partitions manually (advanced)", but I always had my swap inside the same extended partition as my Ubuntu(s), so I can't confirm.

Unfortunately, I also do not know for sure about your other questions, so I won't try to answer them, but I hope someone more experienced in this regard can help you out.