I will shortly be adding a fedora flavor to my devel box. I currently have XP (installed first on an ssd), ubuntu 10.04 (installed second on the first partition of a platter drive), and I want to add either Cent or SL on the second partition of the platter drive. I will probably also want to install win7 on the third partition. I am currently booting of of the ubuntu grub (grub2).
I have tried this in the past, but I have always lost the ability to boot the the first two OSs installed. Installing the first two OSs are not an issue, but the third is no-go. In previous attempts, this was on a linux box where it didn't really matter if I lost previous installs or not. They were more or less temporary installs for testing. This time, I am installing on my main devel box, and it would be quite a bore to screw it up. I have images and such, but I would really rather not spend half a day fixing everything.
I need a procedure to allow me to add additional OSs without breaking the ability to boot. I have tried supergrub in the past, but it was not able to repair the boot setup and I couldn't get back into the other systems I had installed.
I am still baffled that grub isn't installed after the fact. There should be an easy way to load a live linux cd that will scan the drives for bootable partitions and then ask you how you want grub setup. Having every OS have it's own version of grub that it tries to install over the existing grub installs is just a bad idea.
If I install CentOS, should I not install grub, and then boot into ubuntu and try to add Cent to the grub.conf? I am not sure how grub2 works, since it looks like you can't edit grub.conf anymore. What if Cent doesn't have the option to not install grub? I have read doc at Ubuntu about how to re-install grub2 from a liveCD if there is a problem, but surely there is a method other than breaking grub and the MBR and having to fix them later. :wall:
Thanks for the advice,
LMHmedchem