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I have 2 hard drives. On one there's Windows XP pro (my main OS) and on the other one there's some data. Recently someone I know gave me a 10 GB hard drive and not long after that I bought a Removable hard drive drawer. I installed it and everything was perfect until today. I downloaded college linux and burned it on a cd because I wanted to try it. I installed it on the 10 gb hard drive in the drawer and everything was ok. During the installation I set up LILO to be able to boot windows or college linux. I restarded my computer and went into the BIOS and changed the boot sequece like this :
1- Floppy
2-CD ROM
3-Drawer
Try other bootable devices? YES
When I restart my computer, this message appears : Missing operating system.
During the installation I set up LILO to be able to boot windows or college linux.
I'm betting that you installed lilo in the MBR of your primary hard drive. If you switch your boot order to boot off the old drive like you used to you should see the lilo prompt to pick an OS.
To Explain: Lilo does not need to be on the same drive as Linux, in fact in your setup it should not be. Instead lilo is installed on your primary drive and boots from there.
In the installation I didn't choose where to install LILO, anyway I tried to change my boot sequence and put my primary drive instead of the one where linux is. The result is different but still not ok. When I restarted my computer, instead of getting the missing operator error, I'm getting this message :
L <error> ... The first stage boot loader has been loaded and started,
but it can't load the second stage boot loader. The two-digit error
codes indicate the type of problem. (See also section "Disk error
codes".) This condition usually indicates a media failure or a geometry
mismatch (e.g. bad disk parameters, see section "Disk geometry").
I'll reinstall Windows XP because I need a working computer now to work on things but can someone suggest me a good program to chose between OS which one I want to boot. And help me to install it because I have a lot to learn and I really want to try Linux.
Lilo and grub are both sensible and solid enough as long
as you don't play with the BIOS settings between boots...
Removable media may pose a problem, but that should be
easily fixed if you use a CD or floppy to boot a linux
on a removable HDD rather than trying to create a boot-
loader for it.
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