[Novalug] Dual booting OpenSuse and Fedora

[Jay Hart]

Story:  I want to install and test other distros to see if I like something
better then OpenSuse.

I added an additional 160GB drive to my system, and broke it up into roughly 8
20GB partitions. I created one large extended partition, with the 8 slices
begin logical drives. This drive was hooked up to a new PCI based SATA
controller (vendor Siig).

When I created my Fedora media, my Linux box using K3B burned coasters, while
my Windows box correctly burned the disks. (I'm investigating that, but I
might have a physical problem with the burner in the linux box (IDE CDRW)).  I
mention this as a side note.

Also as a side note I wasn't able to install Virtualbox, Yast ran through the
install once, but I don't see any of the files, and I can't get Yast to repeat
the install process, nor can I "uninstall" Virtualbox.

Back to the story:
I have two SATA controllers on the motherboard, which during booting, shows up
prior to the BIOS being loaded for the new SATA Siig controller.  When I boot
into Opensuse (which was previously installed), the new drive shows up as sda,
and the two other SATA drives show up as sdb and sdc. Not sure why they show
up in this order, but so far it hasn't stopped opensuse from being bootable.
It seems to me that the new drive should shos up as sdc.

Installation of Fedora:
So I started off by installing Fedora 8 Live Media, the Gnome CD version. 
This got put on the first slice of the new disk, and since I already had Grub
loaded, I choose not to install the bootloader.

When I was finished with the install, I was worried about not being able to
boot to Fedora since grub didn't know about it. I made sure that I had a
kernel file in /boot, but I noticed that there was no initrd file. So I copied
one from the isolinux directory, and made the correct sym links to these
files.

Next came the hard part of trying to locate which partition the fedora distro
was loaded on, based on what was being reported to Grub located on my opensuse
boot partition.

I think I have overcome all issues, except that once again I don't have a
initrd file that grub will boot, most likely since I copied the wrong one
over.

So, some questions:

1. Would it be easier to copy all kernel and initrd files to /boot on my
opensuse partition, and then specify under the grub menu which partition will
be the root partition for the distro I'm loading.

2. Can I boot off of any 20GB partition, regardless of location on the drive.
Question #1 is a workaround for this question.

3. Can someone point me to the default kernel and initrd files for the base CD
installation, so I can try and see if they work.

Wow, I think this is my longest ever email.

Thanks in advance for reading my ramblings.

Jay