How to install and boot 145 operating systems in a PC

Swarup,

Keep coming with the good words and I might just be able to persudae the Justlinux Admin to upgrade my company bicycle to a company Ferrari, even I haven't seen my company bicycle yet!

I am just a pupil here starting as an absolute beginner a few years back. Wait until you see my teachers and the village olders here. The big guns are among the members and the super moderators here. I am helping others in exactly the way I was helped. I just pray they are not disappointed me as a byproduct of the Justlinux forum.

The answer to your question should be yes but I have not done a full example recently.

You can shrink a partition on either to the left or to the right or even on both ends but you need to know the following

(1) It is best to do one shrink at a time.

(2) It is essential that you never shrink the partition that is providing the operating in use. Think about it and you will understand. No one will be please to return home to find it half the size. There is something to do with the integrity of the OS too. No decent OS would permit itself to be shrunk "while" operating. In other word use Linux A to shrink Linux B.

(3) Linux boot loaders, both Grub and Lilo, work by refering to the hard disk address of the partition, the form of which cylinder, head and sector. Once a partition has been shrunk the original hard disk address is void and so either Grub or Lilo will need to be restored. The Just Booting Tips Section B has all the details to do such restores.

(4) If you shrink a logical partition sda5 you only shrink its boundary inside the extended partition envelope sda2. The original extended partition envelope sda2 is not changed at all and so the vacant space will not be availbe to primary partition sda1 outside. To allow the outside primary partition sda1 to access the free space you need to shrink the extended partition as the second step.

Once the extended partition sda2 is shunk to remove the empty space the vacant area will be availble outside to permit the primary partition sda1 to expand its right hand side.

(5) Although it is slower I would recommend to do one step at a time and only resize Xp in sda1 after satisfying all your sda5 and sda6 are working normally.

Linux is nice to work with because you can know everything you are doing. In the majority of the cases you can even reason it out.

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Originally Posted by saikee

Keep coming with the good words and I might just be able to persudae the Justlinux Admin to upgrade my company bicycle to a company Ferrari, even I haven't seen my company bicycle yet!

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I hope they give you the Ferrari soon. You're worth every bit of it! :)

A couple of follow-up questions:

1.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by saikee

(3) Linux boot loaders, both Grub and Lilo, work by refering to the hard disk address of the partition, the form of which cylinder, head and sector. Once a partition has been shrunk the original hard disk address is void and so either Grub or Lilo will need to be restored. The Just Booting Tips Section B has all the details to do such restores.

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I have done numerous shrinks from the RIGHT side of a partition in the past, and this never required me to restore Grub or Lilo in the past. Is it different somehow for the LEFT side?

2. Does it take longer to shrink from the LEFT side of a partition than from the RIGHT side, since (as I understand) there are some important sections of the partition and a lot of data on the "left" side that needs to be moved at the time of a shrink? Also, as a result of this increased need for moving data from the LEFT side compared with the RIGHT side, is it also more risky vis-a-vis possible partition damage or data loss, to do a shrink from the LEFT side as c/w the RIGHT side? Or is this all just misunderstanding of the issue from my side. Bottom line: is there ANY difference in doing a shrink from the LEFT versus the RIGHT-- and if so, then what is the difference?

Answers

(1) The 1st complete track of a Ext2/3, NTFS, Fat16 and Fat32 is the reserved boot sector where Grub or Lilo resides. Neither gives a toss to what happen to the end of the partition. If you do not restore the hard disk address Grub or Lilo simply goes back to the unshrunk partition location to find its system files and you will get a complaint from the boot loader.

(2) Don't really know the answer myself. Your explanation is as good as any. Don't think there is any risk in the software but if the reszing takes a long time to complete then your hardware has more chance to overheat and misbehaves. Thus I suppose shrinking the right boundary of a partition is less risky than the left boundary. However when you need space you simply shrink once and choose the convenient side to do it. Choose the right boundary to shrink first and then move the shrunk partition bodily to the right just to obtain space on the left boundary gains nothing in practice because the bodily movement probably takes longer.

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Originally Posted by saikee

Answers

(1) The 1st complete track of a Ext2/3, NTFS, Fat16 and Fat32 is the reserved boot sector where Grub or Lilo resides. Neither gives a toss to what happen to the end of the partition. If you do not restore the hard disk address Grub or Lilo simply goes back to the unshrunk partition location to find its system files and you will get a complaint from the boot loader.

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Unless it is only a shrink from the LEFT and not from the RIGHT which requires restoration of the HD address, this does not seem to be required in my system. Perhaps Parted Magic uses such a technique which does the restoration of the HD address automatically. Because I have done quite a number of RIGHT side shrinks, and I have never restored the HD address, and nor have I ever gotten a complaint from the boot loader.

The righ hand side of a partition is its end! A boot loader always boots the beginning of the partition and so only the left boundary matters.

Good day!

Im a newbie to Linux. Is there a way to use this tutorial in installing multiboot Linux to USB HDD. Thnx in advance.

Xthink,

Welcome to Justlinux.

I believe this 18-month old thread may be the answer you are after.

Well done. This thread helps me understand more about multiboot and grub. Thx. :)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by saikee

Xthink,

Welcome to Justlinux.

I believe this 18-month old thread may be the answer you are after.

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Thank you very much for the link. Sorry if I don't see it before asking. This is a very informative forum. More power!

CNET had a weekly question on how to dual boot XP and Vista. I did not read all the nonsense, but I did skip through all 5 pages, and did an EDIT --> Find --> for "Grub" (no quotes) on each page with no results found. Gross!

I honestly think the booting problem is a M$ self made thing. In Linux this problem doesn't exist. The root of the problem of the M$ boot loaders is they have a huge difficulty to "chainload" their own systems.

Vista is one of the 5 M$ Windows I booted in this thread and one of the 145 systems I recorded here. It is in the partition hdc3 as indicated in the presented menu.lst.

What could be regarded as strange to some may be as far as Linux is concerned Vista can be booted exactly like any one of the 145 systems here when the thread was written nearly two years ago.

We can installed and boot 2 Vista without even install a Linux. Just 2 files from Grub are enough.

The booting of Xp and Vista can be made easy by any Linux and I wrote this thread just for the Newbies corner.

It is possible that M$ users are not conditioned to multi-boot. When they get a Vista boot loader BCDedit they may find it hard to put it into use. To a Linux guy I just put 2 and 2 to make 4 by using Vista's boot loader to boot 150 Linux. It was just a simple job of dabbling a Pyhton script.

Holy **** :-)

I am interested in using your technique to load multiple Live CDs onto individual partitions on a USB memory stick and use the simple GRUB chainloader to decide which to start. This would mostly be for demonstrating various Linux distros, and for troubleshooting and recovering borked computers. The keychain Swiss Army Knife for computers.

The challenge for me is in how to get the Live CDs installed into a partition so that it includes its own bootloader. The CDs normally uses isolinux. I need to change to extlinux when I copy the files to the USB stick partitions, then change the various file and directory names from isolinux to extlinux. It should work, but I am still having trouble getting the extlinux installation correct.

I am trying to install the Ubuntu Live CD into the fifth partition of my USB stick. I copied all the files, changed the names to extlinux, installed extlinux, set the boot flag on the partition in order to test it, but it doesn't boot. I just get "boot error".

Once I get it to boot correctly from its partition, I will change the boot flag back to the first partition where I have GRUB and boot it using the chainloader command.

On my 8Gb USB stick, I plan to use the first 2Gb for a data only (FAT) partition. I have Puppy Linux installed in the next partition, and it is working fine with the GRUB chainloader. The next partition is the System Rescue CD, and I can't get chainloader working yet. The next partition is the Ubuntu Live CD, and chainloader isn't working yet there either.

Since Puppy is an actual full install, it installed its own extlinux bootloader, so it worked fine. Since I am copying files from bootable CDs into the respective partitions for the next two, I have to manually get extlinux working on them. I seem to be missing something, probably related to the partition's boot sectors, but I'm still working on it.

Thanks for the great thread! I'm a Linux Newbie and learning a lot!

>>>> Clay >>>>

clayg,


Welcome to Justlinux.

Been two years since I wrote this thread.. I think it explains some of your problem. Haven't tried much on USB pen drive since because an external hard disk is much faster and easier for the same thing.

If you want the Linux to work as a Live CD just copy the files, after expanding them from the iso file by a loopback device, onto the USB and change the isolinux to Grub. The above thread gives several conversion examples. They are pretty straight forward.

Of course, grub would work fine, if I could figure out all the right parameters for each individual Live CD that I want to load. But I like your way of having a simple and consistent GRUB chainloader entry for every partition on the USB stick.

Last night I was successful in getting it to work. The tricky part is changing isolinux (which the Live CDs use to boot) into extlinux (which works on the USB stick) and also adding the mbr.bin to the boot block of each partition. That makes each Live CD bootable inside its own partition. Then the chainloader command works.

I have five partitions loaded and working so far and have only used about half of my 8Gb USB stick. You are right, an external hard drive is much bigger, better and faster for doing full disro installations. But they are not very convenient for carrying around on a keychain! By using the compressed read-only files from the Live CD, I can install several bootable environments and utility disks onto the USB stick and carry it around to do Linux demos (or installations!) or to use the various recovery tools (Ultimate Boot CD, System Recovery CD, etc.).

Thanks for the inspiration!

>>>> Clay >>>>