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Monday 11th June 2007

Local Packages

Fedora Upgrade

Made a start on upgrading my home machines to Fedora 7. First up was my firewall/web/DNS/ftp/mail server machine, which I've set up to be able to run two different OS releases, with the data shared between them. I only had time to do the base Fedora 7 install, and the only point of interest really was that I needed the libata.ignore_hpa=1 hack (see Bugs/F7Common) to get the partition table on the smaller of my 80GB disks to be recognised.

I wanted a way to choose between the two OS releases at boot time. With grub having been installed on the MBR, I only had the option of booting into the new Fedora 7 installation. As a quick fix, I copied the Fedora Core 6 boot entries from the Fedora Core 6 version of /etc/grub.conf and appended them to the Fedora 7 /etc/grub.conf file. That gave me a way to get into Fedora Core 6. A more long-term fix was to have each OS release's version of grub able to load the other OS's version.

I added the following to the Fedora Core 6 /etc/grub.conf: 

title Fedora 7 Boot Menu
        rootnoverify (hd0,1)
        chainloader +1

and this to the Fedora 7 /etc/grub.conf 

title Fedora Core 6 Boot Menu
        rootnoverify (hd0,0)
        chainloader +1

I have disks on this system installed as pairs and everything mirrored (RAID1). The Fedora Core 6 /boot is the first partition of my first hard disk pair, and the Fedora 7 /boot is the second partition. All that was needed now was to install each OS release's version of grub into the /boot partition for that OS release and then my two grub versions would be able to load each other.

I used the standard RAID1 grub installation route:

On Fedora Core 6: 

# grub
grub>  device (hd0) /dev/hda
grub>  root (hd0,0)
grub>  setup (hd0,0)
grub>  device (hd0) /dev/hdb
grub>  root (hd0,0)
grub>  setup (hd0,0)
grub>  quit

On Fedora 7: 

# grub
grub>  device (hd0) /dev/sda
grub>  root (hd0,1)
grub>  setup (hd0,1)
grub>  device (hd0) /dev/sdb
grub>  root (hd0,1)
grub>  setup (hd0,1)
grub>  quit

Note that in Fedora 7 all disks are regarded as being SCSI disks, so the device names change (check /boot/grub/device.map too).