problem with lilo
 

hey i am fairly new to the linux community. i am running RH7.2 and winxp. right now i have my rh drive as master and the xp as slave. well i want to be able to dual boot the 2. i have edited
lilo.cfg, restarted lilo, and rebooted. well the menus gives me 2 choices. one is linux and the other winxp. the linux boot one works perfectly fine. when i go and select teh winxp one it says
starting winxp...and then nothing happens. the activity light on my pc is a constant orange. so it seems the pc is working. but nothing happens. my questions is, am i doing something wrong?
or do i need to install something on winxp to get it to boot? what about if i have winxp as master and rh7.2 as slave? ideas, suggestions woul dbe majoly appreciated, it will make my life of
opening the box and switching hd's much less hecktic =)
thank you

Try adding the lines in bold to the windows section of your lilo.conf file.

other=/dev/hdb1
label=winxp
map-drive=0x80
to=0x81
map-drive=0x81
to=0x80

Then rerun /sbin/lilo. I hope this helps.

yay =)
 

it worked perfect, thank you very very much. i am curious though as to what those commands do?
thanks a bunch =)

hmm.. ok not being a double post sniffer... whatever one of those is meant to be...

they refer to the hex addresses of the ide channels on your system. primary master (hda in linux) is 0x80 and primary slave (hdb) is 0x81.

so this flips them round at such a low level that windows never knows anything different.

the syntax is a bit missleading i reckon, surely if in a previous line you've mapped 80 to 81 then when you map 81 you should surely actually be mapping 80 to itself?? well.. obviously not.. but it's a bit odd.

You're welcome, razey. :D

I have tried the changing of 80 to 81 and 81 to 80 and that doesn't work for my dual boot! I have Redhat installed on /hda while /hdb is my Win 98 SE drive (yes, two hard drives). I can't get it to work with Lilo to boot anything other than just linux. When I tried the 80 to 81 and 81 to 80 I got the error of "Error 0x07". Someone please help!

MeechDawg, post a copy of your /etc/lilo.conf file.

Keep in mind hda (primary) is what redhat is on while hdb (which is set as slave) has Windows 98 on. My lilo.conf file reads as follows:

boot="/dev/hda"
map=/boot/map
install=boot/boot.b
prompt
timeout="50"
message=/boot/message
linear
default=linux

image="/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.2-2"
label="linux"
read-only
root="/dev/hda2"

other="/dev/hdb1"
label="Windows"


-----end of lilo.conf file

I tried putting the 80 to 81 and vice versa in that's posted above but that gave me the Error 0x07 so I took it out. Now it just reads "loading windows...." and doesn't do anything.

MeechDawg

I think you need a "table=" line in the Win98 section. It's equivalent to the "root=" entry for linux in that it tell lilo where to find the valid Win partition table. I think the lilo.conf man pages have a little more on this.

PS- don't forget to rerun lilo (/sbin/lilo) any time you change lilo.conf. Your changes won't be activated unless you do.

Add the ' table= ' line like DMR says. It would look like this:

other="/dev/hdb1"
label=windows
table=/dev/hdb

Note: there is no partition number given in a ' table= ' line.

As for the error message, I found this here .

0x07 Invalid initialization. The BIOS failed to properly initialize the disk controller. You should control the BIOS setup parameters. A warm boot might help too.

Ok... I added the line with the table=..... I also took out the 0x80 to 0x81 n vice versa... Now I'm stuck with L? on boot for the windows hard drive. I have ran /sbin/lilo as I do anytime I edit lilo.conf and I can't seem to think of what could fix this other than uninstalling and reinstalling lilo. Any suggestions?

Ok... I said screw it and I reinstalled lilo.... Now when I select the Windows Hard drive, it says "loading windows" and does nothing. Any suggestions?

MeechDawg

Don't use LiLo.
I use a 3rd party boot/ partitioning program called Boot IT NG ... which I downloaded for free. I'm able to boot into either of my 3 OS, hide the partions from each other (so that each thinks that it's the first) and One OS isn't at the mercy of the other.

I use Grub to boot Linux which is installed on hda1 (which is really not the first partion ... grub just thinks that it is) instead of the MBR.

Ok.... After reinstalling lilo to a newer version (which appears much different on boot), I did the 0x80 to 0x81 or whatever it was... This DID work and helped me get my dual boot working. Problem solved!

MeechDawg

Glad to hear you got it working, MeechDawg. :)