Hi, I have a laptop with 2 hard drives. The first has Fedora 20 (no windows or anything else) and the second is unused. I would like to install CentOS7 on the unused drive so I can dual boot with the choice of the 2 OS's on the Grub menu. I am comfortable in partitioning drives and installing Linux distributions. I am afraid I may mess up the MBR and/or set up Grub incorrectly so I lose everything. Please point me to some documentation to help me. Thank you, Joe
On Thu, Jul 31, 2014 at 11:37 AM, Joseph Hesse <joehesse at gmail.com> wrote:> Hi, > > I have a laptop with 2 hard drives. The first has Fedora 20 (no windows > or anything else) and the second is unused. I would like to install > CentOS7 on the unused drive so I can dual boot with the choice of the 2 > OS's on the Grub menu. > I am comfortable in partitioning drives and installing Linux > distributions. I am afraid I may mess up the MBR and/or set up Grub > incorrectly so I lose everything. >Make backups of the data you care about. Also back up your MBR.> > Please point me to some documentation to help me. >I can't resist. http://lmgtfy.com/?q=linux+backup+mbr Entire MBR is in the first 512 bytes. Bootloader is in the first 446 bytes (followed by the partition table of 66 bytes, which is the difference of 512 and 446). https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Master_Boot_Record#Backup_and_restoration http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-how-to-backup-hard-disk-partition-table-mbr.html http://www.linuxjournal.com/magazine/hack-and-when-disaster-strikes-restoring-master-boot-record -- ---~~.~~--- Mike // SilverTip257 //
On 07/31/2014 11:37 AM, Joseph Hesse wrote:> Hi, > > I have a laptop with 2 hard drives. The first has Fedora 20 (no windows > or anything else) and the second is unused. I would like to install > CentOS7 on the unused drive so I can dual boot with the choice of the 2 > OS's on the Grub menu. > I am comfortable in partitioning drives and installing Linux > distributions. I am afraid I may mess up the MBR and/or set up Grub > incorrectly so I lose everything. > > Please point me to some documentation to help me. > > Thank you, > JoeI see no answers to this, so I will tell you this: If you have a CD (or USB drive) with the Super Grub Disk from www.supergrubdisk.org, you will be able to get to your linux installations no matter how badly you mess up you MBR. It is usually quite difficult to cut yourself off from an existing installation, because usually the new install process will find the old installation and include it on the new menu. Ted Miller