Hi All,
I got a new harddrive sigate baracuda 60GByte few days ago
and i've decided to put win&linux on it;
I made 10Gbyte first primary partition and install Win2000 on it.
I do it with win98-fdisk. Next i boot from RedHat8 boot disk and
install linux. I created 6Gbyte primary ext3 partition and 256Mbyte
swap partition and selected grub to be my default boot loader
in first sector of boot partition. I enabled LBA32 support too.
It seems all is ok but when i set linux partition as active and restart computer nothing happend. Grub didnt start. I can still
boot linux with boot diskette but it is ugly. If i set windows partition as active Win2000 boot loader works good.

Can anybody help me with that problem ?

Where did you install grub?

# /sbin/grub-install /dev/hda

also make a grub boot disk:

# /sbin/grub-install /dev/fd0

because it's much faster than syslinux or anything else.

I think grub is installed in first sector of /dev/hda1 (root directori of my linux). I'm afraid that if i install grub
in /dev/dha (MBR) it will destroy Win2000 boot loader and i will
lose windows. At home on my 5GByte quantum, disk installation i
mentioned work very good. i have redhat7.3 at home but it's not big difference i think...

I have my students dual boot RH 7.2 and Windows 2000 (both Pro and Server, depending on the class) all the time with Grub using the MBR and it presents no problem whatsoever for Windows. We just have to be careful during the install to make sure we get a menu entry for Windows 2000. And when we are done, we clean up the drives with fdisk /mbr or Ranish Partition Manager. I haven't tried dual booting RH 8, but I should imagine it works the same.

As stated above, the best thing is to make Grub the boot manager for both W2K and Linux -- and put its boot code on the MBR.

The reason this works is that the W2K ntldr boot code is put in the boot sector of the Windoze partition, not the MBR. When Windoze formats a drive/partition, it sets out default boot code on the MBR so that the BIOS and bootstrap loader can find the correct Windoze boot sector, and then the code in the MBR is simply loaded to memory, executed, and it chainloads the required boot sector boot code.

When Grub boot code is loaded to the MBR, the default code is overwritten and Grub's boot code loads the main part of Grub which then takes over the rest of the boot process. That's the short version of that story.

Anyway, grub works very well as long as you let it and as long as it knows where to find each OS that it is asked to load. The "knowing" part requires that you give each OS a "name" and that each OS is correctly identified to where its kernel or kernel loader can be found. When you look at the /boot/grub/menu.lst file you will see the "name", in the form of a title, and the partition of its boot sector.

Let me add an Amen to using Grub in the MBR--definitely my preferred choice. Another good option is LILO in the MBR. Not becuase it is better, but there are more references to it--easier to search for help on. Most folks claim it is easier to configure.

There is also the option of using the Windows 2000 Boot loader. Your system is already set to do that--you just need to tell Windows how to find Grub. Big picture, you want to copy the info to a Windows file called boot.ini and reboot the computer. There are a lot of references for this!

In Google, type: Windows NT Linux Dual Boot

NT because Win2K is actually NT5. They are set up the same way and, in my not-so-humble opinion, you get more hits for NT than for 2000. Anyway, this will bring up a page of links that will describe how to use the Windows loader (NTLDR). I think the first one is the best/easiest to understand. Here is its address:

www.computing.net/howto/advanced/linuxnt/

Good luck

Then make a grub boot floppy first:

grub-install /dev/fd0

and then you can see if that boots into Windows 2000. If it does, then install it onto the MBR:

grub-install /dev/hda

because, well, basically it's the same code going onto the boot floppy and the MBR. If one works then the other one will too.

Bert

Thank you all
Bert, grub works really good on /dev/fd0, thanks for advice