Help: Replacing my Windows partition with Linux in a dual boot machine.

From: Marie-France (marie_at_travel-net.com)
Date: 11/14/05 

Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2005 21:47:23 +0000

Hi all,

I got a dual boot machine with Windows and Red Hat Linux 7.3 (yes old
but stable).

I no longer use Windows (on /dev/hda1) and I would like to use this
partition to test different Linux distros. The first one I want to
install is Suse.
(Unfortunately, a dual boot Linux/linux machine is not well documented
especially when upgrading)

The boot loader I use is GRUB.

So currently I have:

/dev/hda1 --> Windows (to be replaced with Suse)
/dev/hda2 Linux
/dev/hda3 Linux
/dev/hda5 Linux
/dev/hda6 Linux
/dev/hda7 Linux swap

I'm not 100% sure what to do and I would like some advices.

First, I think it is perfectly safe to reuse the same swap and /tmp
partitions for both Linux systems, right?

Also, it should be straighforward to install Linux on /dev/hda1 but I'm
not too sure what to do next in order to have a dual boot machine with
Suse and Red Hat.

Also, I would prefer to use the GRUB configuration file under Red Hat
since this is my stable OS.

Thanks.

BTW, a slighty related question:

I had planned to move my /tmp partition on a different unused partition
to free more space for SUSE. Both partitions are ext3 partitions.

Sounds easy I thought. I just need to swap the 2 mount points in fstab
and reboot. I did just that but after rebooting everything seems fine
except X would not start!

every 12 seconds or so the following error message was logged:

     gdm_slave_xioerror_handler: Fatal X error - Restarting :0

Note: my fstab uses labels but besides having misleading labels (that
can be corrected anyway) I don't see that as an issue.

Any idea what I'm missing there?

Thanks again!

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