...Top posting this time...

I agree with Kevin about the partition labeling being an issue.

You *could* set up your partitions before you try any install (with one of
the live-cd distros). Or, you could use a live-cd to fix the labeling issues
(assuming you still have an intact system on one of those partitions).

You would use `e2label` to set the partitions labels to "". Then you would
mount the various root filesystems and edit fstab files on them to not use
labels (like Kevin suggested). I fixed my system this way once.

Bart



>
> 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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