dual booting

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Jan 01, 2010 at 12:55:35PM -0800, William Park wrote:
> My motherboard is Asus M2N-E (fairly old one).  When I press <F8> during boot,
> I get a list of devices to boot from (ie. harddisks, cdroms).  I did notice that
> Ubuntu, OpenSUSE (may be Fedora) change the name and then order of devices.
> But, Slackware and CentOS are predictable and familiar.

Well I no longer rely on device names.  I use UUID for everything.
Of course I also don't tend to have windows on my machine either.
I think my laptop still has it installed, although I have no idea if it
still boots.

As for ordering that would be entirely dependant on the kernel, not the
distribution (although whether the distribution uses udev or similar
to manage device names is another story or if it uses labels or UUIDs
for mounting).

> Right now, my boot "tree" goes something like this:
>     /dev/sdb -- /dev/sdb1 -- Slackware64 (my main)
>                                      -- /dev/sda (jump to second harddisk MBR)
>                                      -- /dev/hda (jump to first harddisk MBR)
> 
> So, unattended boot ends up with Slackware64 on /dev/sdb1.  I can boot from
> /dev/sda or /dev/hda, from LILO bootloader or from BIOS boot menu.  Key
> insight is to have each harddisk or each partition be responsible for its own.
> 
> However, GRUB only works when I boot into that harddisk directly from BIOS.
> LILO (Slackware is the only one using LILO) and Windows are more "tolerant";
> I can boot them after 2 or 3 indirect steps.

I gave up on lilo many years ago.  To inflexible.

> Same here.  I just give the whole harddisk to Windows, and let it do whatever
> to it.  The same for Linux.  Harddisks are cheap, especially if you don't throw
> way old disks.

Most laptops only have one disk, so sharing is the only option.  On a
desktop you have more choices.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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