hi.Im total beginner
I nearly lost all of my data and now I need someone to explain to me
why this happened

On my PC I have 3 partitions and on each there is OS installed.
Now I wanted to add Red Hat linux 9.Here is how I did it:
-First I told Red Hat to automatically partition my drive
-I selected 'Remove all Linux partitions on this System'
-As bootloader I've choosen Grub
Since I already have OSs on my system,Linux Setup should detect them,
but since it only detected partition running Win98(it named it DOS),
I added the other two manually.

-I named Win2k OS located on D partition Win2kD and OS located on E partition Win2kE(In Linux Setup I made this one to boot by default).

-Then I installed linux and rebooted and up comes GRUB and gives me a choice of which OS to start .

I could start Linux,but when I tried to start Win2kE it wrote:

BOOTING Win2kE
BOOTNOVERIFY(H0,5)
CHAINLOADER +1

"and after I pressed enter"

BOOT failure
Insert Boot diskette in A:

Same happened when I tried to run Win2kD.

But when I started DOS(Win98)I was again presented with option as to which OS to load(I think it was
windows bootloader) and then it worked

So can someone explain to me what happened?Why couldn't I start those two OSs?
And why did only pressing DOS enable me to start Win2kE and WinkD?

thank you very much

Ok, yeah. you need to configure grub yourself to load these other operating systems.
boot linux, and post the contents of the file /boot/grub/grub.conf config file, we can go from there.

also, in linux, we reference the drives by there address, not a letter.

hda = primary master
hdb = primary slave
hbc = secondry mater
hdd = secondry slave.

and reference different partitons by numbers, not by letters

hda1 would be the first partiton on primary mater
hda2 would be partiton 2 on primary master, right...

i also need to know what disks and what partitons each NON linux operating system is install to in order to config your grub file.

post as much of what ive asked as you know how to do, and we can go from there.

found this on google, might help.
http://www.linuxmigration.com/quickref/kernel/grub.html

if not, just post the info like i asked, and some1 should show u what changes to make.

hiya

Well I'm ashamed to say but I didn't remember all the details.
I bought Linux for Windows Administrators book and just followed the author's instructions(thought he used Red Hat 7.3)
I'm only on page 50 and so far author didn't mentioned master or slave names.As far as names go,if I remember correctly Win2kE was reffered to as dev/hda3 and I then named it Win2KE

But there are few things Id like to point out:
-First,though Im not 100 percent shure,I picked LILO as default booter (but I might have been sloppy and picked Grud instead)

-While in setup I've got a warning to make Boot disk cos it might not be able to boot(Im talking about actual warning here)

Can you tell me why when pressing on DOS(Win98),the old(windows?)booter appeared?

Last question-how do I uninstall Linux and still be able to boot other OSs?

Since I don't want to take your time I will try to go to the link you provided and figure it out for myself

thank you

To boot up yr machine in win2K again you need to boot from the win2k CD and select.
1. Select System recovery console
2. Fixmbr <enter>
3. Fixboot <enter>

this will repair the MBR and boot loader to win2K bootloader again. Note : Your linux is still intact as yr other OSes.

first of all, don't worry, your data isn't gone (the bootloader is probably pointing to the wrong partitions). second, use mintedice's solution only as a last resort (that process will reload the windows bootloader). i have noticed that redhat's detection of other os's is rather sloppy.

ok, so now my suggestion is to edit your grub config on boot. when the system boots, you will see some options below your list of os's. you press a key (not sure which one, but if you read the screen, you can figure it out) and you can edit the boot commands. what you want to change is (hd0,5) under the windows load commands to like (hd0,1) and keep changing those until you get the right partition and windows boots. when you get the right partition, boot linux and edit /etc/grub.conf (you need to be superuser, so type "su" and enter the password, then use "gedit /etc/grub.conf" to edit the file) to match the partition you discovered during messing around with the grub configuration in grub. that will make your bootloader configuration changes permanent. good luck.

since it seems that you are giving up, you may want to try knoppix (www.knoppix.org) to get somewhat familiar with linux before going for a full on install. knoppix is a live cd distribution which means that the entire os runs off of the cd without installing anything to your hd.

linux does have a high learning curve. but it can be worth the effort. don't give up because of one small issue.

hiya

I But I should mention that I if I press DOS it brings up the windows bootloader and from there I can start any OS.But I still wonder why it can't detect Win2KE and WinkD directly?

Anyways,could this be the reason?...during the installation of Linux I got a warning message:"Boot partition may not meet booting constraints for your arhitecture"

thank you so much for taking the time

oh,I just read your last post.I don't plan on giving up

bye

good, glad you're not throwing in the towel.

follow my first post and you should be able to directly boot both your windows os's from grub. you will need to create two entries in grub.conf, one for each partiton. it should look like this:

title Windows 2000 D
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1
title Windows 2000 E
rootnoverify (hd1,2)
chainloader +1
title Fedora Core (2.4.22-1.2115.nptl)
root (hd1,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.22-1.2115.nptl ro root=LABEL=/ hda=ide-scsi rhgb
initrd /boot/initrd-2.4.22-1.2115.nptl.img

you will have to fiddle around with the (hd#,#) with the method i described in my first post. the first two entries are examples for your windows os loaders and the last entry is the linux loader for my system. what happened with the DOS entry is that it must point to the windows boot loader located on one of your partitions already. redhat just likes to call any windows partition dos. once you have everything set up correctly, you will no longer need the DOS entry.

as for your other question: the install process will always say that. there was a limit with older hard drives where the bootloader could not be placed beyond a certain point and still work correctly. if you have current hardware (built within the last 3 years or so) you should be fine.

That's because your win98 and two win2000s is only sharing one bootloader, which resides on the first bootable partition(system partition) which in most cases is the win98 partition if you installed it first before installing win2ks, the bootloader does not need to be installed in the boot patition(where your winnt/windows folder is) itself.
In order to directly boot win2k/xp from grub it has to support loading the winNT kernel. Currenty its not supported and I doubt it will any time soon, if ever.

I actually thought of an idea of doing this(booting multiple win2k/xp directly in grub) few days ago, I couldn't get it to work properly but it could be due to the fact that my operating systems sees the disk drive order differently from bios. Its quite simple, I basically use a simplistic kernel that loads a floppy disk image as its initrd, it worked with standard dos/pcdos bootdisks, for some reason its not correctly detecting my drives when I use a win2k/xp bootdisk. If you want to try this method just post a reply, I'll be back checking out the forums again in a few hours.

hmmm, demonbane may be right...i've never tried setting up linux and two separate windows (nt) os's on the same system. the only way to do it may be how you have it set up now where grub loads the windows boot loader which is used to select exactly which version of windows to boot. you may still want to try to use my suggestions to see if you can get it to work anyway. peace.

Thank you all for helping me out