Triple-Boot Ubuntu, Fedora, and Vista
Background
So here, I will share my experience when I did my first triple-boot to give you an idea on where to start.
I used my laptop, with a 80GB hard drive, partitioned it into 1 primary and 1 extended partition, dividing up the extended partition further more. I used Fedora 10, Windows Vista Home Basic, and Ubuntu 9.04 respectively.
1 | Primary Partition #1 (ntfs, 20.00 GiB) |
So basically you have 7 partition all in all. One thing to notice is that I’ve created a swap for each linux distro, it is not necessary to do it because I later found out that both distros use both swaps making my swap a total of 2GB.
Steps
Now, I installed Vista first so I wouldn’t have a problem later on restoring my GRUB. Next is install Ubuntu, basically you do as you do it on dual boot. Lastly is Fedora, there are 2 options, use Fedora or Ubuntu’s GRUB. Each are the same, but I preferred using Ubuntu’s GRUB (I didn’t install the Fedora’s GRUB during its installation). Then you add Fedora’s boot partition in Ubuntu’s /boot/grub/menu.lst
like the following below,
1 | title Fedora Core 10, 2.6.27.5-117.fc10.i686 |
All in all
Your menu.lst
should look something like this,
1 | title Ubuntu 9.04, kernel 2.6.28-11-generic |
Now, you should have a successful triple-boot! Also, now you can restore your GRUB using each of their Live CDs.
This method can be used with any combination you like and number of OSes, but just limit to your hard drive capacity. Having multiple OSes is cool, but too much is just plain wasteful.