Tribooting,Resizing NTFS,Adding Distros to it

[cheetahman]

Resize NTFS
Delete swap
Delete FCNow you should have Windows and a bunch of free space.
Out of the free space create 2 partitions
One for FC, one for Suse, leave both partitions unformatted.
Install FC, make sure it doesn't put swap in the partition for Suse.
It probably won't by default. Put the bootloader wherever you want.
Install Suse 9.3, using swap already created, and putting Grub on the MBR.
Suse should make an entry for both Windows and FC.
Tri-boot.[/quote]

Are these good instructions
Could you give an example of adding a distro

[saikee]

The number of partitions is immaterial I think as you can have them empty or space unallocated. You need at least 3; one for Fc, One for Suse and one for Swap.

Both FC and Suse are big guns and can do with about 7 to 8Gb partition each, although I have installed FC2, FC3 and FC4 in the same 5Gb partition by overwriting each one. I also have Suse 9.1 and 10 both sitting happily in 5Gb partitions. Mind you my personal data is in a neutral partition(Fat32) accessible by all systems. Thus my Linux has virtually no personal data and slim fit.

Each Linux during installation will look for a swap. No good creating more than one as it can be confusing (asking you to nominate one). I think 1 Gb is ample for a common swap. Mine is 2Gb and got criticised for being big.

I would install FC first and opt for "Manually partition with disk Druid".

Select the partition, choose to format it and click it as a mounting poing for /. This will make FC install everything inside one partition. I am not a great believer in chopping up one Linux into several partitions as it can get out of control when I put a few distros in.

On the boot loader I recommend you opt for

"Configure advanced boot loader options"

As it will offer two choices. Choose root partition (same partition as the installing Linux).

When the FC has been installed it can't be boot yet so don't panic.

Proceed to install Suse. It has been a while and I can't remember the step of Yast which is Suse's hardware configurator. Basically you do exactly as above except this time you opt for the bootloader in MBR. Suse would detect each partition for its boot loader. Windows and FC will be included because each has a bootloader in its root partition. A partition always gives up its first track for the boot loader. Formatting the partition doesn't this area.

On rebooting after Suse installation you should have triple boots.

Both FC and Suse use Grub (I notice later Suse offering Lilo as well) so it pays to make a bootable Grub floppy. You do this by dropping into the terminal mode after booting either Linux, pop a floppy into the drive and type

dd if=/boot/grub/stage1 of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 count=1
dd if=/boot/grub/stage2 of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 seek=1

When the writing finishes remove the floppy, go to the bank, open a safe deposit box to put it in and take out an big insurance to cover it from theft as this floppy can boot any system you have in a computer. I mean every system; DOS, Win3, Win9x, Win2k, XP and any Linux you can find with just 3 lines at boot prompt

root (hd0,1)
chainloader +1
boot

(hd0,1) is hda2 and chosen as an example. If you can't resist the temptation then try it on your 3 systems. Just remember Grub counts everything from zero. The floppy only requires a boot loader at the root partition of every system you wish to boot.

Once you have Suse running you can replicate its boot loader in the root partition ( in addition to the MBR) so that you can safely expecting your next Linux to carry out the qradbooting automatically. The replication is done while you log in as root and issue this command in terminal mode

grub-install /dev/hda2

if Suse is in hda2 and so on.

Happy triple booting and don't forget the deposit box