Multi-Boot Madness

[seeker]

Unfortunately, I didn't have enough HDs to put each distro on separate drives, so I tried a quad-boot with Kubuntu, Suse, Sabayon & Fedora Core. All was well, until I installed FC last, and it wiped out the ability to boot the previous 3 OSs. I'm about to blow FC away and start from scratch with the other 3, but since FC does at least boot, I'm giving it a stay of execution.

This stay may not be very long, because I'm having plenty of problems managing it, primarily because it won't let me do much of anything, without root privileges, and when I try to do so, it doesn't accept the only password that I established during installation. It appears that I'm logged in as just a regular user, but when I tried to switch users, it still didn't accept the password.

Is there any way to establish a password for root while logged in as a user?

[uOpt]

Welcome to the club. Fedora from FC5 or so has an extremely annoying partition editor that blew away some stuff for me, too, on two occasions.

Are the other partitions still present? Then you should be good to go with a couple grub/menu.lst entries.

[bacon12]

Are the other partitions still present? Then you should be good to go with a couple grub/menu.lst entries.

Not necessarily, if the other bootloaders were installed on the MBR then you will have to rewrite them to the appropriate partition.Then edit grub menu.lst to point in the right place.


Is there any way to establish a password for root while logged in as a user?

Password for what? If you are user open console and "su" enter, then root password. If you have it wrong, or forgot it there isn't anything you can do as user to correct it.

[seeker]

I finally got myself logged in as root...i think. At least it's not nagging me with continous login windows. I'm not certain about how much of the other distro's partitions still remain, because they aren't labeled by distro name, only by the name Media and their size. It appears that the installation got alot of things wrong, because I can't mount any of the other OSs, nor even open basic system files in FC, that relate to the others.

I've about decided that it's not worth the hassle of trying to fix, and to just start over from scratch. The only question in my mind is whether to even bother with FC again. If I do, I think that I will install it first, because I think the other distros would handle subsequent functions better, in terms of Grub and mount.