ESL Adventures

I wasn’t happy with just having my laptop dual booting between Ubuntu and Vista. Nah. I had given up on the XP/Vista/Ubuntu triple boot idea mostly because the XP Pro CD I have doesn’t have the right drivers for my SCSI hard drive.

In working through the terminal stuff with Eric, he sort of turned me onto the idea of trying Fedora Core. So we came up with a partitioning scheme that will allow me to triple boot among Vista, Ubuntu and Fedora Core 7.

The partitioning was the easy part. Once I remembered that I had to reboot after wiping out the last three of the four partitions I already had setup, it went flawlessly.

For the curious, my partition table looks like

/dev/sda1 — Vista

/dev/sda2 — Shared data

/dev/sda3 — Swap

/dev/sda4 — An extended partition containing…

/dev/sda5 — Ubuntu 7.04

/dev/sda6 — Fedora Core 7

/dev/sda7 — /home

/dev/sda8 — /tmp

So now I’m at the point where I’m ready to scream. My first attempt was a failure. I didn’t pay attention to the GRUB (bootloader) screens when I installed Fedora so I ended up not being able to boot into Ubuntu. Thankfully I was still able to get into Windows.

After consulting with Eric, I decided the easiest thing to do was reinstall Fedora and add Ubuntu into GRUB. So I did that.

Failure again. Although I now have the option of booting into Ubuntu, I still can’t because it throws an error at me. But again, at least I can still get into Windows.

So now I’m off to try to mount my Ubuntu partition in Fedora through some CLI magic (and it really is magic to me) and then find the names of vmlinux and initrd (whatever those might be).