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chickengenius
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PostPosted: Tue May 10, 2005 2:38 pm    Post subject: Dual booting SuSe and Gentoo... Reply with quote

Ok on /dev/hda 1 2 and 3 is Gentoo (working) and on /dev/hdb is Suse. My problem is when installing Gentoo I knew I was going to lose my Suse bootloader and replace it when installing Gentoo but I don't know how to set my grub.conf to boot my suse installation. I tried as if it were winblows but I really didn't expect that to work and it didn't. ;) Can anyone give me an example grub.conf for booting suse 9.2 64bit on my second harddrive (ide)?
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Bob P
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PostPosted: Tue May 10, 2005 3:20 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

i did it on a box once. ultimately, i was dissatisfied with the SuSE kernel, as it was very slow -- slower than a Gentoo genkernel. my custom-build Gentoo kernel was so much faster that i ultimately decided to boot SuSE using my Gentoo kernel. making the switch was as easy as pointing to the gentoo kernel on the kernel boot line for SuSE in grub.conf, and pointing to the SuSE "/" directory on the other partition.

i have to admit, i thought it was kind of silly to keep SuSE around after that, so i eventually ended up getting rid of it. but on a slow box, if you didn't want to compile I could see an argument for running SuSE with a custom built gentoo kernel. but ultimately the box was much faster when i just installed Gentoo on it. imho, the time spent compiling paid off in the end.
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chickengenius
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PostPosted: Tue May 10, 2005 3:33 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

My girlfriend needs suse, at least for now because she is not very patient and in gentoo nothing is really working. I have no cdrom drives working, no video players, no games etc. My comp speed is not an issue athlon 64 3400+ with 512mb ddr400 ram with a geforce fx 5500 256mb. Actually I do have KDE installed and working under gentoo but it is seriously lacking in features in comparison and I have a lot to learn in order to get all my drives working, sound working, video player in gui, etc. So how do I point grub to boot Suse 9.2 on /dev/hdb1 (hd1,0) What is the actual line that I would put into grub.conf?
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polle
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PostPosted: Tue May 10, 2005 3:43 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

can't you boot from the suse cd and make a boot floppy ( the floppy will contain the information in order to create an entry in your gentoo grub.conf for SuSe also)
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Bob P
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PostPosted: Tue May 10, 2005 5:10 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

to make it easy for us to asnwer your question, please post your bootloader configuration file from your working gentoo installation and from your working suse installation.
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pacde
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PostPosted: Tue May 10, 2005 5:20 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

OK, Im going by memory here and I dont have Suse but I think it would be something like this. vmlinuz is the Linux kernel executable and of course you would have to point root to your SuSE root partition. Im assuming 9.3 here but thats configurable.

# For booting Suse Linux
title Suse 9.3
kernel (hd1,0)/vmlinuz root=/dev/hdb1
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chickengenius
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PostPosted: Tue May 10, 2005 5:31 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

pacde wrote:
OK, Im going by memory here and I dont have Suse but I think it would be something like this. vmlinuz is the Linux kernel executable and of course you would have to point root to your SuSE root partition. Im assuming 9.3 here but thats configurable.

# For booting Suse Linux
title Suse 9.3
kernel (hd1,0)/vmlinuz root=/dev/hdb1


Now your talking! that sounds about right, I think I also remember seeing vmlinuz back a couple of distro's ago. I will give this a try when I get home tonight. If not I suppose I can check my bootloader config in suse, I would have to mount /dev/hdb1-3 and find it. Anyone know what suse uses for a bootloader and where the config file would be? I think I can just copy this info and put it in my current grub.conf.
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pacde
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PostPosted: Tue May 10, 2005 5:32 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Suse bootloader defaults to GRUB and I think you will find it in /boot

*edit
Please let me know how it goes, we hardly use the power of grub and Im thinking of exploring it further but Im interested in knowing if this works for Suse since I was thinking of FTP install of suse.
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Bob P
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PostPosted: Tue May 10, 2005 6:20 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

suse uses grub but iirc it uses menu.lst instead of grub.conf. so you might need to change a symlink.
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chickengenius
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PostPosted: Mon May 16, 2005 8:03 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Bob P wrote:
to make it easy for us to asnwer your question, please post your bootloader configuration file from your working gentoo installation and from your working suse installation.


Where is my suse bootloader config file at usually? I think if I could find it I would be able to handle this one. Right now I followed the advice above and it works to an extent because the kernel panics. It says it can't init anything and panics. There might be an init file that needs to be identified to grub.
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Pink
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PostPosted: Mon May 16, 2005 8:18 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The entry for my grub to boot Suse 9.3 is as follows:
Code:
title Suse 9.3
    kernel (hd0,3)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda4 vga=0x31a selinux=0  splash=silent resume=/dev/hda2  showopts
    initrd (hd0,3)/boot/initrd

My Suse partition is hda4, adjust accordingly.

The easy way to do it, (as you mention 9.2 and 9.3, and both with have slightly different entries) is to mount your suse partition.

Then navigate to the /boot directory - obviously Suse has exactly the same boot locations as any other Linux using grub - and look in the /grub directory at menu.1st

Simply copy the relevent entry from the suse menu.1st to your grub.conf (which is simply a link to the menu.1st). You will get a more accurate way of booting Suse doing this as you will then have all the boot options available, such as the initrd, bootsplash and so on.

Add the entry (I have shown mine above) and reboot. As it is grub, there is no other configuration needed. You will keep your gentoo grub install but be able to boot Suse.

HTH.
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