On a Windows laptop, say I use the fedora 40 workstation live cd to make a clean install of fedora onto a new ext4 partition, say nvme0n0p7 (mounted at /) with nvme0n0p1 (includes the original/updated Windows boot stuff) mounted at /boot/efi.
Is there any way to then tell the boot mechanism to mount ext4 partition nvme0n0p5, where there is another fc40, as / (instead of the new nvme0n0p7)?
What you’d basically want is to have two installations of Fedora on different partitions of the same drive, if I understand correctly. From what I have seen/read this is hardly a viable solution, as Fedora can’t really handle multiple installations. Even if you manage to manually tweak the GRUB config files, that might only last until the next kernel update on any of the two Fedora instances takes place.
It is documented that boot managers such as rEFInd can handle such a setup, but have never used it myself. You’re also bound to maintain an additional software system.
Another setup is to have two swappable drives, might not be what you’re looking for though.
@tqcharm thanks for that, and it seems about right, although, somehow, I had fedora rawhide, 39 and 40 (not to mention some ubuntu with latest mainstream kernels) all booting fine at some point on that box, including after kernel updates (just needed to do grub2-mkconfig in multiple places to keep the grub menus in line with which kernels were actually installed for each distro/version).
Even so, I suspect it is not a good idea and never guaranteed to be reliable/stable!
But … I would be ditching the new installation (nvme0n0p7 in my example scenario in the original post in this topic) immediately I was able to boot into the old one (nvme0n1p5 ). I would end up with only Windows and 1 fedora 40 workstation to boot into. You see, secretly, all I actually want to achieve is to use my old fedora installation (on nvme0n1p5) again (which I would never be able to recreate from scratch, including hardware/firmware fixes and load of other stuff I have listed elsewhere), for which it seems I’ve “hosed” the boot mechanism.
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