anderstornvig.dk

Article largely based on my post here http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=49265 in the Arch forum.

Don’t ask me why I want to tripleboot. It’s actually quite stupid since I only want to use Arch Linux. But I guess I want an easy transition from Ubuntu. XP? well sadly most games only run on Windows, so what can I do. It’s not that I game regularly. In fact the count hardly hits two in a year but.. Let’s just leave it.

So I wanted Arch Linux on my shuttle pc because I like it on my laptop. This was my partition table before:

To make room for Arch I used gparted to shrink sdb1 by 40gb and create a new partition named sdb2. I was a bit worried about this because sdb1 wasn’t empty, but I had no data loss.

Next, I rebooted and installed Arch without bootloader, mounted / to sdb2, /home to sda2 and swap to sda3, so that Ubuntu and Arch share home and swap.

Rebooted again and started Ubuntu, added the following to /boot/grub/menu.lst, above the Ubuntu and XP entries of course.

title  Arch Linux
root   (hd1,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz26 root=/dev/sdb2 ro vga=773
initrd /boot/kernel26.img

title  Arch Linux Fallback
root   (hd1,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz26thinkpad root=/dev/sdb2 ro video=vesafb:off acpi_sleep=s3_bios resume=swap:/dev/sda3
initrd /boot/kernel26thinkpad.img

To get these two entries right, study the “resume=swap:/dev/sda3″ line, the “root (hd1,1)” lines and the “root=/dev/sdb2″ parts

Did the final reboot and the tripleboot worked.

I learned that it’s safe to use gparted and that grub isn’t as advanced as I thought.

Good luck to equal minded out there!