Triple-Boot Ubuntu, Fedora, and Vista

how-to
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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.

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Primary Partition #1 (ntfs, 20.00 GiB)
Extended Partition #2 (extended, 36.52 GiB)
Logical Partition #4 (ext3, 8.00 GiB) – Ubuntu
Logical Partition #5 (linux-swap, 1.00 GiB) – Ubuntu Swap
Logical Partition #6 (ext3, 8.00 GiB) – Fedora
Logical Partition #7 (linux-swap, 1.00 GiB) – Fedora Swap

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,

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title Fedora Core 10, 2.6.27.5-117.fc10.i686
root (hd0,7)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.i686 ro root=UUID=0a5ed460-5d07-40b1-9ca1-50ff10214c80 rhgb quiet
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.i686.img

All in all

Your menu.lst should look something like this,

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title  Ubuntu 9.04, kernel 2.6.28-11-generic
uuid  df1599f4-12b7-4419-87de-e4c9c27799d4
kernel  /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-generic root=UUID=df1599f4-12b7-4419-87de-e4c9c27799d4 ro quiet splash
initrd  /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-11-generic
quiet

title  Ubuntu 9.04, kernel 2.6.28-11-generic (recovery mode)
uuid  df1599f4-12b7-4419-87de-e4c9c27799d4
kernel  /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-generic root=UUID=df1599f4-12b7-4419-87de-e4c9c27799d4 ro  single
initrd  /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-11-generic

title  Ubuntu 9.04, memtest86+
uuid  df1599f4-12b7-4419-87de-e4c9c27799d4
kernel  /boot/memtest86+.bin
quiet

### END DEBIAN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST
# This is a divider, added to separate the menu items below from the Debian
# ones.

title  Other operating systems:
root
# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for a non-linux OS
on /dev/sda1

title  Windows Vista Home Basic, 6.0:build6000
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1

title Fedora Core 10, 2.6.27.5-117.fc10.i686
root (hd0,7)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.i686 ro root=UUID=0a5ed460-5d07-40b1-9ca1-50ff10214c80 rhgb quiet
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.i686.img

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.