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Boy am I lost.
SITUATION:
disk 1 (hda) W98
disk 2 (hdb) FC2
This worked.
Now
disk 1 (hda) WXP
disk 2 (hdb) FC2
FC2 will not boot, I get a grub prompt and am lost.
TRIED:
Have tried to use the Rescue disk and can get to the FC2 system.
Verified the grub.conf
Copied the 512 bytes of the boot sector to a file and placed it on the C: drive Changed the WXP boot.ini.
Have tried to boot the FC install disk to get the bootloader to update but it will not let me add anything and then says the boot loader was not updated because nothing was added!
I am forgetting something and can't remember what I did to get the setup running with W98. Can anyone help?
Thanks,
I am terrified that if I do that the WinXP disk (hda) will get fouled up. Is it a requirement that grub go into the MBR? I thought that if I copied the first 512 bytes from the /boot partition on the FC2 disk to a file on the C: drive that the NTLOADer could then call grub? I looked at the W98 steps and if looked like putting grub in the MBR was required then but WXP can load the file then boot FC2. OF couse that is what I have tried and failed. Grub just boots to a grub prompt.
It'll be alright. Everytime I install a distro of GNU/Linux I always choose MBR and everything goes fine. If there are any issues, you just need to boot off a Win98 disk (that's what I use) and use
By convention device files have certain names and many system programs have knowledge about these names compiled in. They expect your IDE disks to be named /dev/hd* and your SCSI disks to be named /dev/sd*. Disks are numbered a, b, c and so on, so /dev/hda is your first IDE disk and /dev/sda is your first SCSI disk. Both devices represent entire disks, starting at block one. Writing to these devices with the wrong tools will destroy the master boot loader and partition table on these disks, rendering all data on this disk unusable or making your system unbootable. Know what you are doing and, again, back up before you do it.
Primary partitions on a disk are 1, 2, 3 and 4. So /dev/hda1 is the first primary partition on the first IDE disk and so on. Logical partitions have numbers 5 and up, so /dev/sdb5 is the first logical partition on the second SCSI disk.
what i meant was that
hda is not the first partiton as understood above my last post
and it is the MBR the first 512 bytes that come before hda1,so when we install lilo or grub on hda we mean that we are installing them on the MBR
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