L2W My Multiboot System

Losing your job has consequences which often don’t hit you fully until some time afterwards. My company provided a laptop and an unlimited Verizon wireless account. They made it very clear that I was free to use this as much as I like for work and personal usage. It made alot of sense as I worked for an ISP, and it would be rather silly to run around installing the internet all day whilst having no access to it myself. This meant that I would need to get a new internet connection for my job-hunt when I was let go, and I would further need to straiten out my unused computer with its many partially functional operating systems.

I decided set up my computer for three primary operating systems, and innumerable virtual ones. I sliced up my drive into six partitions. One 15 gig NTFS partition for windows XP, one 15 gig Ext2 partition for Ubuntu, and another for Fedora, or any other OS I want to play with. I made these partitions using Parted Magic through UNetbootin. Its a very handy tool, you go to their website, scroll down to the link for Parted Magic, download the exe and run it in windows. It asks you to reboot windows and after doing so you’ll find a new entry in your NT boot menu. This new entry will boot you into Parted Magc which serves as a fancy front-end for Gparted and lets you fiddle with your hard drives partition table. Because I had made the NTFS partition only 15 gig I didn’t have to shrink it at all, instead I made three partitions with the unused space. Because you can only have four primary partitions, without throwing things all to pot, I could only make the two OS partitions and a large extended partition containing the /home directory for Ubuntu (and Fedora, and whatever), and another for the swap space.

If you’d like, you can also download the UNetbootin installers for both Ubuntu and Fedora, I had the DVD/CD with me so I didn’t do this, but instructions for this can be found here. In theory a sensible person would install the OS whose boot loader you wished to use last, I didn’t do this. Instead, I installed Ubuntu 7.10 in the second 15 gig partition and after doing so I installed Fedora Core 8 in the third. This caused all kinds of splendid problems with Ubuntu and grub, resulting in a grub menu lacking an entry for Fedora, and after fixing that I had a corrupted /etc/fstab on Ubuntu that resulted in a barely bootable OS. To fix the first I added a grub entry by looking for the filename of the vmlinuz and initrd files in the /boot directory of Fedora and putting them in the proper places. If you don’t know how to do this you can find a handy dandy tutorial here, and if you want to jazz it up with some graphics there is a tutorial for that as well.

So now I have a system that can boot into any of its three operating systems, and that keeps all the user files for both GNU/Linux operating systems on my large /home partition. The two GNU/Linux OS’s share a single swap drive, Fedora could mount the Ubuntu root directory as /media/Ubuntu, and they both mount my NTFS drive as /media/Windows. It all seems to be going along rather swimmingly, that is until it doesn’t. The very next day I found myself unable to bring up Gnome, the default graphical desktop on Ubuntu. After poking around a bit I found this was because the /, and /home directories were not being mounted. I found an empty /etc/fstab, the nearest I can figure is that the changed UUID on the Fedora partition somehow panicked the Ubuntu system during bootup and it cocked it up dramatically. Herein lies the greatest perk of having two GNU/Linux operating systems on the same computer, I just copied the /etc/fstab file from Fedora to Ubuntu and changed around a few things, then I booted up Ubuntu and popped the UUID’s back in. To get the UUID of a drive simply type “sudo ls /dev/disk/by-uuid/ -l”, this gives you a list of all the drives by UUID. What is an UUID? I’m not entirely sure myself, but it seems to be a unique hash stuck in an easily readable part of a partition so that that partition can be identified no matter what device its attached to. So, for instance, you can have a flash drive that is mounted to /media/My_Flash_Drive, no matter which device you plug it into.

Ok so it seems that everything has come together quite nicely right? I can boot into Windows XP, Ubuntu 7.10, or Fedora Core 8, if I boot into either of the GNU/Linux’s I can see the other two operating systems root partitions, and the /home directory for both GNU/Linux based OS’s are the same partition, as are the Swap partitions. There is but one problem, what if I want to listen to music I have on my Ubuntu /home directory under windows? This is where Ext2 Installable File System For Windows comes in. Its a simple driver that allows windows to mount ext2 and ext3 partitions. I haven’t had much luck though getting it to mount ext3 partitions, but it mounts ext2 every time without fail. I can now access my large /home partition from windows and use it to store larger files that I don’t want to clutter my NTFS partition with. All in all this setup works out great, and should keep working out until I have to do a major upgrade, or decide to try another operating system in place of Fedora Core 8. But of course for further operating systems theres always virtualization…