How many OSes on one physical disk?

[Patrick C]

I'm fairly sure you can have an infinite number of logical partitions, once
you make the big extended one that holds all of them. I'm not sure it's
practical or a good idea to give each distro its own boot partition. If I
were you, I'd just let one distro (the one with the prettiest GRUB, duh
[which I've always found to be SUSE]) handle the boot. You might want to
keep one separate boot partition and let one distro handle that, and if you
want to switch which distro is controlling GRUB, just copy the stuff from
the /boot partition to a temporary location, say "/newboot", and then remove
it from that distro's fstab, unmount it, and move "/newboot" to "/boot."

Then you can just install a new distro and let it take over the grub, or
alternatively boot one of your other distros (make sure to reinstall GRUB
from whichever distro you moved the boot partition on, so that the MBR knows
where to look for it!) and do the reverse of the above process. Mount the
partition as something other than /boot, copy the /boot to it, rename /boot
/oldboot, and unmount/remount the partition to /boot, and make the
appropriate entries in the fstab.

On 3/27/07, vodhner at cox.net <vodhner at cox.net> wrote:
>
> (Was:  How to safely update open office to 2.0+?)
>
> OK, I didn't pick up the point about an old version of Mandrake.
> Now I understand the "safely" part.  That does lead to a need
> for some hacking.
>
> If you want the latest apps, and don't want a major hacking
> challenge each time you want to update, then it's best to have
> a fairly fresh OS and application environment.
>
> I've learned to move on to new distros every year or two, and
> keep a few on the back burner so I know what's out there.
> Otherwise, Linux definitely has forced-obsolescence problems
> like any other environment, because the software and
> hardware continue to develop.
>
> Since I also do some work in Windows, and share files
> between Windows and Linux, I have my data neatly tucked
> into separate partitions, mostly FAT32, and this means I can
> replace an operating system easily without having to rebuild
> my whole life.
>
> AS A RESULT, I'd like to have lots of Linux versions in place
> at the same time, for multi-booting.  This leads to a partitioning
> question.
>
> I have this nice 130-GB disk.  I would like to break it up into a
> whole slew of partitions, but I gather there are definite limits.
> Thus I can't have, for example, 99 different OSes on this drive
> each with its own boot partition.  Right?
>
> How far can I go in this direction?  Is there a practical way to
> have partitions within partitions or something?  Something like
> an ISO filesystem housed in an ordinary file?  If so can it
> update its data while running?  Etc.  .  .  .
>
> I'm thinking that VMWare and lots of virtual profiles could be
> one way to go, and that way I could keep one basic system
> running all the time while I'm tinkering with the others.  But I'd
> like to look into the multi-multi-boot approach too, if I could put
> lots of boot partitions on one disk.
>
> Ideas?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Vic
>
> ---- KevinO <kevin at kevino.org> wrote Re: How to safely update . . .
>
> - - -
> What you don't understand is that he is running an outdated and
> unsupported version of Mandrake, so there aren't any pre-made
> packages for his distribution containing the latest version of OO.
> - - -
>
>
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