Reconfigure Boot Disk
 

Background:

120GB HDD
Installed XP to first 8GB - Primary/Active partition
Installed RH 9 as follows:
- hda2 - /boot (500MB)
- hda3 - /Home (60GB)
- hda4 - / (45GB)
- hda5 - Swap (1GB)

I chose to use the Grub installer, but do do some from /boot instead of the mbr (which XP currently inhabits). However, silly me, I chose not to do a boot disk during the installation, because I figured that I could just use the one I had done for one of the previous botched installs I had done earlier (you know, like the generic Win98 startup disk).

Well, because my mbr boots to XP and only to XP, I want to use the boot disk to boot into Linux, but when I try to do so, it's pointing to /dev/hda1 (which is where it was when I last installed).

Question:

Can I somehow edit or reconfigure the boot disk to point to the right partition? Or do I have to reinstall RH9 just to get the right boot disk?

PS - If this is found in another thread, let me know where it is. I decided to stop looking after checking about 20 with no success.

The better distro's have a possibility to make a rescue start. In my opinion RH has that option to.

Start from CD and give it a try...........

CloudBuilder

And then what?

I read in another thread that you can use a mkbootdsk command to redo a boot disk, but the command also requires the kernal name, and I'm not sure what that is, and I'm not even sure that command can be ran from the manual rescue mode. I guess I'll give it a try though...

Or, are you saying that I just need to boot from the CD each time instead of floppy?

Thanks for your help, by the way! :)

No you can reinstall the mbr so you can boot to both distro's :)

CloudBuilder

Thanks.

I ended up fixing it on Sunday by using the mkbootdisk command from the recovery console off the Linux CD, then using that bootdisk to boot into Linux and finally copying the first 512 bytes of the /boot directory to a floppy as a "linux.bin" file which I then transferred to my C: drive in Windows after mounting that partition as vfat. Lastly, I configured the boot.ini in XP to allow Linux as an option using that linux.bin file. Works great now!!!