[Freevo-users] Dual Booting Conundrum

[Graham Balharrie]

Hi guys,  (sorry for the long winded message... hope you dont truncate!)   Im soon going to go all out and make the Mini-ITX motherboard etc I have run linux and Freevo (I'm thinking Freepia for ease?)   Anyway,  the problem is, I also like to use a REGULAR install of linux and windoze on my system, but dual booting a media box isnt the best solution   What I was therefore thinking is this... 1)  Buy a compact flash > ide adapter 2)  Put it on the secondary IDE, set it to slave 3)  Set the bios to boot in this order         -Sec Slave         -Pri Master 4)  Install a bootloader on the Compact flash media 5)  Have freevo/linux as the main OS that boots by default, and then have windoze and a normal linux install under different partitions... which could be booted from the CF Media.   Therefore, when I put the CF card in, I could chose which OS to load, but without, the normal OS and freevo would load.... correct?   Just wondering has anyone else tried this?   Also, as another question, I know that with all media boxes, space (hard drive) is an issue, so, i was thinking... is it possible to have ONE SINGLE Linux OS on the system, and then allow TWO SEPERATE run levels, one to be executed as standard (5 i assume) ---> which would move directly into Freevo, and the other which would be executed by the bootloader on the compact flash??   Is it possible to pass parameters to the kernel such as run level, FROM a bootloader?   This would be much easier (I assume)  and save on space... then I could mess about with Freevo from within the same system.   Thanks in advance for any ideas/advice. Graham Balharrie