[sf-lug] Dual Booting Linux Ubuntu/CentOS...Learning purposes

[Ken Shaffer]

1) Backup, assume the worst happens and you have to restore all from your
backup.
2)Plan your disk layout.  None of the OSes you mentioned cares about whether
its partition is a primary,
but a future Windoz might.  You may have 3 primaries, and and extended
partition.  Within the extended,
you may have as many partitions as you need (some limit, but not one you are
likely to run into with what you
stated).  You certainly may share the swap partition among all the OSes you
mentioned (and even point a Windoz to it for page with a little work).
/home is another good partition to share -- just ensure your user/group ids
are the same across OSes.  /boot used to be separate to keep it within a
certain number of cylinders of the disk beginning for BIOS access, but not
sure that's still an issue anymore.  Putting it behind a / however makes
that a moot issue -- if it works there, it would still work as a regular
directory within the /.
3  Assuming you want to leave / alone (and /boot), looks like you wa)nt to
turn swap off, delete the swap partition, unmount /home, shrink the /home
partition to free up some space on the disk for other partitions, then
create an extended partiton with all the free space.  Then you may create
logical partitions within the extended, including swap.
4)   Remount /home and turn on swap (?? better check the /etc/fstab
descriptions to make sure, I'm not sure how much GParted does for you)  and
you should have your disk numbered (e.g. hda) hda1, hda2, hda3 (your first
three primaries), hda4 (your extended which you do not use directly), and
hda5 ... as your logical partitions
5) Install new Oses in hda5 ...
But remember, above all, backup first!
Good Luck
Ken
2009/2/7 vincent polite <vpolitewebsiteguy at yahoo.com>

> I want to dual boot Ubuntu, already installed, and CentOS. Debian/Redhat. I
> wanted to create a virtual machine of CentOS using VirtualBox. But it just
> wasn't going to happen. I tried a straight install to the free space I have
> on my hard disk. But, I was told I have to many "Primary Partitions", 4. I
> have; /, /boot, /home and /swap. Is there a tool I can use to remove /home
> and /swap from the primary partitions? And have them shared? I downloaded
> GParted. Thanks.
>
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