Wagner, Steven G wrote:

> I divided the drive into three primary partitions and installed Xandros on
> the first one. Then I tried to install Mandrake on the second partition, but
> it saw the first '/' mount point and wanted to use that. I set another '/'
> mount point up on the second partition and installed Mandrake to that one,
> but got errors saying I had duplicate mount points. After the install
> Mandrake wouldn't boot and I think it was trying to mount the first Xandros
> '/' and expecting Mandrake to be there. Kernel panic and freeze.

Sounds like Mandrake, like Red Hat, is using the labels of the partitions to 
figure out what to mount where.  I don't know how to get around it in the 
install, but you could look at the /etc/fstab file of each OS after installing 
(use a floppy boot disk if necessary) and make sure that the entries aren't 
something like:
LABEL=/                 /                       ext3    defaults        1 1

but are instead:

/dev/hdb3               /                       ext3    defaults        1 1

> After that I reinstalled Mandrake and this time named the second mount point
> '/mandrake'. I didn't really think that would work (and didn't), but I tried
> anyway. My drive is set up with three primary partitions, first formatted
> with reiserfs (the Xandros install) and the second and third are ext3. I
> would like to use Grub to control everything, but I think that Xandros had
> put it's own version of LILO in the mbr of my primary master.

let the last install put its version of grub in /dev/hda and then make sure that 
it is configured to boot the various linux distros and Windows.  Most installers 
(RH, Mandrake, Suse, etc...) auto detect the Windows OS and create an entry in 
their /etc/grub.conf file and might pick up the other Linux distros.

> I'm thinking that I'm not setting up the partition table correctly in the
> first place or that I'm not formatting the partitions right. For Xandros, I
> just set up a '/' mount point and the installation created the entire linux
> directory for me under that. Also, it formatted the partition to reiserfs. I
> was hoping that Mandrake would do the same for me under the second partition
> and that I could use Grub to select which one to boot to. Maybe I need to
> explicitly create the entire partition directory for Mandrake. But that
> still doesn't fix my problem of what to name the second primary partition to
> avoid having duplicate mount points.

Try giving them different labels, but don't change the mount point

e.g.
Xandros
/dev/hdb1 mount point / label XandrosRoot

Mandrake
/dev/hdb3 mount point / label MandrakeRoot

etc... (if you can find the option for labeling them in each installers utility.

> Any help is really appreciated and I'll be googling around and experimenting
> some more in the meantime. After all, this is a learning experience for me
> and that was really the whole idea of doing this.

You actually need at least 4 partitions on hdb for the linux distros.  1 for 
each distro and one for a shared SWAP space.  Swap doesn't have to be very big. 
  On most of my systems I stop adding to it after about 1GB even as I add more 
physical RAM to the system as I never seem to use up very much swap (even when I 
had a testbed server at my last job running Oracle with 2GB of RAM).
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