Dual Boot Linux EMCs ON One HDD???

[pepperwood]

Well Folks - I'm back again at this. Here's the situation. One PC - One HDD to install Dual EMC2 - Ubuntu 6.06 EMC2 & BDI. 4.51 EMC2 only. Dual Linux Boot System I guess you'd call it.

Have installation CD's for both. Ubuntu installs. Using its Auto partitioning. When BDI installs using its Auto partitioning it wipes out Ubuntu every time & vise versa. Contrary to what you'd expect. I'm not a whiz kid but that plus something has been left out.

Upon reboot only the last EMC will show up on startup screen. Does it make any difference which EMC is installed first. How do I get both to install & show up on the start up screen??

Not all that familiar with Installation, manual partitioning & reconfiguration but if somebody would like to give me a recipe I'll do the best I can to set up MBR, Grub, Create needed partitions & size accordingly & the necessary reconfigurating.

Yes, we're starting with a brand NEW HDD. Would like to have both EMC2 available, is all, feel comfortable knowing how to get it done for future situations.

Thank you for your patience & understanding. Your input is important & I would appreciate hearing from you.

Pete

[Gads]

Pepperwood
I know I can't help but someone else may be asking the same question I am. are you trying to have two versions of linux both with emc2 or ubuntu with two versions of emc ?
Good luck
Gads

[pepperwood]

Gads you wrote:
I know I can't help but someone else may be asking the same question I am. are you trying to have two versions of linux both with emc2 or ubuntu with two versions of emc ?

Mr. Gads - Thank you for your note. Yes - that's exactly it. Two different distros, versions, flavors, etc. of EMC2 on the same HDD. The one is 6.06 Ubuntu EMC2 version 2.2.2 CD! The other version is the BDI 4.51 EMC2 CD that I got from Sherline. Sounds simple enough but for reasons I can't comprehend will not occur. Hope that this helps. Pete

[armstrong360]

Pepperwood, the first thing you need to do is to determine what partitions each of these two distributions need. I don't run either - maybe someone else on the list can help there OR you can determine it yourself. If you open a terminal window and type 'mount
you will get something like this:
/dev/hda3 on / type ext3 (rw,noatime)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec)
udev on /dev type tmpfs (rw,nosuid)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,nosuid,noexec)
/dev/hda1 on /boot type ext3 (rw,noatime)
/dev/hdb4 on /home/temp type ext3 (rw,noatime)

This is from my gentoo system. The hard drive partitions are the /dev/hdxx entries. If you have a single hard drive then they will be /dev/hdax (or /dev/sdax if they are scsi drives) From the list above I have three partitions / /boot and /home ( and a swap partition which doesn't show in this list) You can determine how much space is being allocatted to each by issuing a df command (disk free)
df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda3 12G 11G 608M 95% /
udev 10M 216K 9.8M 3% /dev
/dev/hda1 99M 18M 77M 19% /boot
/dev/hdb4 19G 484M 17G 3% /home/temp
shm 157M 0 157M 0% /dev/shm

I expect what you need is:

swap
/home -- same for both distributions that way you can have access to your files no matter which one is booted
/ for system a
/ for system b
/boot - this one can be shared

So install one distribution and do the manual partitioning thing - setting up partitions for both systems - you will be using all but one in this installation if it will let you create the file system on the unused partition. Once the installation is done - you need to record the information in the file /boot/grub/grub.conf. This tells grub what kernel to use and what partitions to mount as root

Now when you install the second do not do any partitioning or making of file systems. Set up the install to put the root files system ( / ) on the partition not used in the first install.

The second install will likely have over-written the grub.conf file. So you may have go go and edit back in the information you recorded before.

[Gads]

Hi Pepperwood
You still leave me with questions but if I understand you right you want ubuntu computer operating system and 2 different versions of emc. From what i have seen and read in the past is the BDI does the installations for you, operating system then emc during the same installation. I installed the ubuntu 6.06 emc 2.2.2 download allongside my windows xp mach3 and things worked fine. If it's true you want 2 versions of emc I think I would download the older version of emc, then setup ubuntu/emc2 then try to install the old version of emc on the same ubuntu/emc2 setup. I believe the BDI may be your problem as from what I understood this install was designed for people like myself who are new to linux/ubuntu and is probably esigned to overwrite everything it encounters. if your looking for 2 versions of linux, ubuntu & redhat for example each with thier own version of emc and to still dual boot it may still come back to the BDI being the problem. I would google the latter option to check out some of the linux dedicated sights to see if the older versions allow dual booting and how to setup.
a quick google showed a number of combinations but I didn' scan through.
Gads