[PlanetCCRMA] FC8 basic install question

David Nielson naptastic at comcast.net
Wed Jan 9 09:23:01 2008


On the bootloader thing:

I recently installed F8 alongside F7, and depending on how you have your 
hard drive set up, the bootloader setup doesn't have to be so complicated.

On all my machines now, I am leaving a 100 MiB (that's megabyte, not 
gigabyte) partition right at the start of the drive, and /boot lives 
there for every Linux installation.

Grub Stage1 is installed in the MBR, and loads Stage 1.5 / Stage 2 from 
the /boot partition. This partition has all of the kernel images, initrd 
files, etc., and a grub.conf file allowing booting of all linux systems 
on the drive as well as chainloading Windows. I find this to be the 
easiest way to do things; adding a new operating system is as easy as 
installing it, then making sure grub.conf gets updated. No messing 
around with "who takes over the MBR"...

(Since F8 is working so well for me, I also blew off my F7 installation 
to try Debian, and it didn't work as I planned: Debian somehow broke the 
MBR so I couldn't boot anything. I had to use the F8 installer to 
reinstall Grub, then manually update grub.conf to include the correct 
entries for Debian.)

Best of luck!
David Nielson