I de­cid­ed to try Arch Lin­ux on my note­book. The rea­sons don't mat­ter.

How­ev­er, there was this prob­lem about the CD drive be­ing bro­ken, and the lack of a flop­py drive.

So, how did I do it?

I had a par­ti­tion I could de­stroy (/de­v/h­da3)

I in­stalled qe­mu.

Then, I start­ed qe­mu us­ing the whole HD and a CD ISO im­age (boot­ing from the CD!):

qemu -hda /dev/hda -cdrom arch-0.7.1.iso -boot d

Then, very care­ful­ly I in­stalled it on hda3 and did not in­stall GRUB.

Copied the ker­nel and ini­trd im­ages to /boot on the oth­er lin­ux in­stal­la­tion.

Edit­ed grub.­con­f, adding the Arch en­try...

And it worked.

Keep in mind that if you make a mis­take, this will com­plete­ly de­stroy all your da­ta. But if you are care­ful, and have enough space, you can in­stall your next Lin­ux while you use your cur­rent one.

Now, is that cool or what? :-)