Hi everyone,

I need your help!!! :) My Vaio Z600ne uses a PCMCIA card CD-ROM and USB Floppy Drive. I currently have Windows 2000 installed, and I have also managed to install RedHat 7.0 with just one problem.:

Because the floppy is USB it is not recognized in the installation therefore I cannot make a bootdisk.

Since I haven't got a bootdisk, I cannot boot into RedHat because Windows takes over the boot process.
Even though I have tried loading LILO into the MBR, Windows 2000 still takes over.

How can I make my machine boot into Linux?

Cheers for the help in anticipation.

cya

Bojan.

Hello bojan:
Perhaps this can help you:
http://www.xyzzy.clara.net/vaio.html
You must start from the pcmcia cd-rom (configure from BIOS)

Hi reader,

Cheers for the help.

I can install the Linux ok, except it doesn't create the boot disk because the floppy drive is usb and it doesn't recognize it during the installation, so I always have to skip the 'create bootdisk' part.

Afterwards the systems automatically boots into Win 2000 without LILO even having a chance to load, even though I tried installing it into the MBR.

Windows 2000 somehow protects the MBR, I think.

The problem is how do I boot into linux, so that I can make a bootdisk?

thanks.

Bojan

Hello again
Have you read this?
http://www.redhat.com/mirrors/LDP/HO...NT-Loader.html
Perhaps you can do something with another image, or you can read the corresponding sector from your hard disk and so generate the file.

Bye
Reader

Hi,

I had a good read through the HOWTO you mentioned, and followed its procedure.

Let me run you through what I did:

1. I managed to boot into Linux rescue mode with the RedHat CD.
2. Mounted the /dev/hda3 where Linux resides, and that is also where I pointed LILO to be installed. I managed to check lilo.conf with pico and that was set to "boot=/dev/hda3" as expected.

3. I Mounted my other backup partition /dev/hda5 which is actually FAT32 and I use it to back up work.
4. using the command dd if=/dev/hda3 of=/linux.bin bs=512 count=1
5. I transferred linux.bin across to the /dev/hda5 and then rebooted.
6. Linux.bin was placed on root of my C: and I changed the boot.ini of Win2000 to add the line C:\linux.bin="Linux"..

Up to this point everything was fine. I rebooted and tried booting into Linux with my new option, but it still wouldn't boot.

To see what was happening.. I managed to find a little program called GAG, (a boot manager), and with that I set up the two operating systems to boot into.

The Windows 2000 bootup goes through it fine, but the linux one states that "there is no bootable partition" or something like that, so in effect it doesn't recognise it as bootable at all, which just boggles me.

Any ideas?

At present my hard drive is split like this

/dev/hda1 FAT32 ... Where Win 2000 resides
/dev/hda5 FAT32 .... BackUp drive for work. ( I don't know why its called /hda5, by Linux, but I don't think it matters.

/dev/hda3 Linux Native .... Mount Point /
/dev/hda4 Linux Swap.


btw Cheers for all the help so far,.. you've been brilliant.

cya

Bojan