Dual Linux Boot

Hey,

I'm pretty new to linux and I'm trying to do a dual boot with Debian and SuSE. I installed Debian first then SuSE trying to find a way in the setup so it shows Debian as a choice when I boot. I think I have to edit the lilo.conf file but I'm not even completely sure on that, and if so what to put in it so I can boot to Debian. All help would be appreciated, and assume I know nothing (because I don't).

Thank you

First off, congratulations on your foray into Linux.. and into picking two of the best distributions around !

As far as I remember, SuSE and Debian will both detect other O/S's at install time and create the relevant entries in your lilo.conf for you....

Have you already installed both and you can't see one of them ? If so you might have accidentally installed one over the other...

I don't think that I installed over Debian...when I got into LVM in YaST I can see my hda1 and hda2 partitions that I made for Debian, and also hda5 and hda6 for SuSE. Although I'm not sure why only hda1 is a physical drive and the rest are logical??? I hope this tells you something about whats wrong here.

Thanks again.

I think that might be it - you've got one version of Linux in a logical drive rather than in a primary partiton on the disk. I had that situation when trying to put Linux onto a PC that had no more room for another primary partition. There's a command, is it dd, that you can use to write out the boot bit of the Linux disk into a file. Then you can put the file onto your Debian boot partiton and create an extra LILO command to start it. It will then go off and boot from hda5 or wherever it came from. Sorry to be hazy, but basically that's all I know other than that it works! Can someone fill in the details please?

Ok, So I thought I would just start over (since I became pretty sure I in fact did install SuSE over Debian...), I havent quite made it to installing both yet but I hopefully ill be able to see what I did wrong this time (taking note on what partitions i create). Though I'll probably be posting more in the very near future.

Success!!!!

I'm really not even quite sure what I did different except note which partitions where for what and made sure not to write over them. But thanks agian for the help, this site rocks.