On Nov 26, 2013, at 3:00 PM, Javier Perez <pepeb...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> In theory, Ubuntu and Fedora will have their own partitions inside the SDD.
> My question is, can I share the /boot partition between Fedora and Ubuntu?
> both are using Grub2.
Possibly because Ubuntu calls GRUB2 grub, while Fedora calls it grub2 - at
least for now, this may change at or after F21.
Since /boot/grub is for Ubuntu and /boot/grub2 is for Fedora, their respective
grub.cfg's are separate. The other thing is that the grub packages will also be
separately updated, but this tends to not affect grub as installed unless you
rerun grub-install (or grub2-install on Fedora).
A possible gotcha is that Ubuntu's grub2 tends to be an older version than
Fedora. And only one grub boot.img (previously called stage1) and core.img
(previously called stage2) can be installed to a drive at one time. So you'll
have to pick which distribution's grub is to be installed *to the disk*. It's
ridiculously confusing, but there are two meanings of "installing grub":
distribution package installation vs grub-install which installs the bootloader
to the disk. Boot.img goes in the MBR, and core.img goes in the MBR gap. *sigh*
Anyway, I think you can get away with it because things are rather differently
named. However, I'd make /boot bigger than the default of 500MB.
Let me backup a step. The hardware is UEFI or BIOS based?
> Right now I have two /boot partitions (one on each HDD) and it is a pain. For
> some reason, Ubuntu does not find out Fedora unless I mount the disk each
> time I update ubuntu kernel. If I update Fedora kernel I have to go to Ubuntu
> to redo the boot config files. (Yes, the master boot goes to Ubuntu for some
> reason I do not remember any more). I want to keep just one /boot partition
> of maybe 800 MB to make everyone feel confy.
Yeah well you're learning, as have I, that linux distros aren't very friendly
to each other, and multiboot is a hostile experience due to the lack of any
meaningful cooperation among the distributions to do a better job. Hence the
bootloader spec proposal to try and bring some sanity to the process. The spec
has some outstanding problems, any of which are resolvable by distro
stakeholders sitting down and having a conversation, but that hasn't happened
so far.
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/BootLoaderSpec/
> Also, although it is off topic, is there any good tutorial to virtualize the
> Win2K partition as is?
You might want to shrink the NTFS volume, and then the partition. Next you can
dd it to a file, and then in virt-manager or virsh, you specify the file as
Raw. I haven't tried using rsync -a or cp -a to copy it into a qcow2 file
instead, but that'd be nice. For one, qcow2 is sparse, so it'll be a smaller
size file. Once you've tested it works, you can snapshot it, and only use the
snapshots going forward, in case you break something you can just toss the
snapshot and make a new one. Also, since the large backing file doesn't change,
it gets backed up once, rather than the whole file being backed up every time
it gets touched by booting Windows.
One negative is that Win 2K is old, and I don't think its virtio drivers are
current for the latest versions of qemu/kvm anymore, so you may have to suffer
with something of a performance hit presenting that backing file as an IDE
drive.
Chris Murphy
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