I agree that adding unique /boot partitions might do the trick, but the problem is, I think I'd have to completely re-partition my second 80GB (Linux) disk and that's a really scary prospect:
Code:
# fdisk /dev/sdc -l
Disk /dev/sdc: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders, total 156301488 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xde462e57
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdc1 * 63 4209029 2104483+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdc2 4209030 46154744 20972857+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdc3 46154745 156296384 55070820 83 Linux
I did try with a 16GB thumbdrive a while ago, as I have a Natty system built onto it - yes, it's extremely slow - but that didn't seem to work, either, at the time. I think I'll give it another try today or tomorrow to see if what I've learned from my other poking around has any effect.
In the meanwhile, I've managed to re-install Fedora 16 pre-Beta and openSUSE 12.1 Milestone 5 onto each of their own partitions on the 3TB drive and can boot them at will from my main openSUSE 11.4 GRUB menu after copying the /boot directories from each of them over to /boot/Seagate/<os name> and adding appropriate stanzas to my primary menu.lst:
Code:
###Added manually 16 Sep 2011 1005EDT
title OneiricTest -- Ubuntu, with Linux 3.0.0-11-generic on 3TB Partition 7
root (hd1,1)
kernel /boot/Seagate/Oneiric/vmlinuz-3.0.0-11-generic root=/dev/sdc7 ro nomodeset resume=/dev/sdc3 vga=0x348
initrd /boot/Seagate/Oneiric/initrd.img-3.0.0-11-generic
###Added manually 17 Sep 2011 1040EDT
title Fedora 16 Beta on 3TB partition 4
root (hd1,1)
kernel /boot/Seagate/Fedora16/vmlinuz-3.1.0-0.rc6.git0.3.fc16.x86_64 root=UUID=c958f578-d90f-4c87-82d1-718ae
d946b6a ro nomodeset rhgb quiet vga=0x348 raid=noautodetect resume=UUID=a4c9ac84-1e2e-4158-a6bb-cc73c035b358
initrd /boot/Seagate/Fedora16/initramfs-3.1.0-0.rc6.git0.3.fc16.x86_64.img
###Added manually 17 Sep 2011 1525EDT
title openSUSE 12.1 Milestone 5 on 3TB Partition 5
root (hd1,1)
kernel /boot/Seagate/OpenSUSE121/vmlinuz-3.0.0-4-desktop root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/57c89500-8857-48bb-8588-b900
904a9d57 nomodeset resume=/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3000DM001-9YN166_Z1F0116P-part3 splash=silent quiet showopts vga
=0x348
initrd /boot/Seagate/OpenSUSE121/initrd-3.0.0-4-desktop
So, yes, now I can go "play" with these distros. BUT, I can see that Legacy GRUB is quite adamant about not letting me add a third disk to the mix so that I can chainload to it. I've tried various adjustments to the device.map to no avail. (It was interesting to see that openSUSE 12.1 uses Legacy GRUB and a 3.0 kernel that gives a slightly different different string under /dev/disks/by-id from oS 11.4 and its 2.6 kernel, BTW). Ideally, I'd prefer to be able to have one short stanza that would permit me to jump over to the Seagate drive and bring up someone's (preferably Ubuntu's) GRUB2 menu and then select my test distros from there. It's what I've been doing for a year on my single-internal-hard-disk Acer Aspire Netbook, but no luck here so far.
I'm suspicious that may be due to the 4096 byte sectoring, but I can't prove it yet, nor can I prove that anyone's successfully scribbled a GRUB(2) boot block on the 3TB drive, either.
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