Ian McDonald wrote:
OK - To me it sounds like you're wanting to have two separate installs of FC on your machine and be able to read them from each other but still keep them separate. Correct me if wrong.
I hadn't even thought of anything as sophisticated as that! All I wanted was to install FC6, but to keep FC3 on the machine, so as to be able to boot either into FC3 or FC6. The reason for keeping FC3 is simply that I have to be sure I can do all the things I do now in FC3 until I've got them going in FC6 as well. I have in mind particularly all my financial stuff. In other words, I'm just keeping a safety net for now.
In this case you will have two /etc/fstab s - one in FC3 and one in FC6. In your FC3 you would have it as you outline.
In your copy of /etc/fstab under FC6 you would label /dev/hdb1 /bootfc3 and /dev/hdb2 /fc3 and /dev/hdb5 /boot and /dev/hdb6 /
I know now that I was missing something fundamental, just as I suspected. There's no necessity in FC3 for me to have access to hdb5 or hdb6, so there's no need for me to have the FC3 fstab file refer to them. It's only in FC6 that I'll need access to hdb5 and hdb6. However, there's still one thing niggling at me, though, as I gather you use Debian, it may not be a thing you'd care to comment on. Say I boot from the FC_6 i386 DVD I have and start an installation. In that process, I gather I'll be prompted where to put things and it's at that stage that I'll identify hdb5 as my /boot partition and hdb6 as my / partition. When I've done that, I take it that the new installation will create a new fstab, that'll have in it just the common swap partition and hdb5 and hdb6. What I'm trying to get at in a roundabout way is this: there's no risk that the new installation'll just overwrite my existing hdb1 or hbd2 without asking, is there? Sorry to be such a pain, but my ignorance makes me scared of things! Leslie