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Anyway, apparently I have the lilo.conf file in the wrong place, b/c if I boot my system up without any CD's or bootdisks and it will boot straight into Windows XP. I need a way (from the command line interface) to move the lilo.conf (which is in /dev/hdf4) to the MBR (/dev/hde i think...) how can I do that? I am relatively new with the different commands but I can usually figure them out pretty fast when told which ones to use.
your lilo.conf needs to be in /etc/ not the MBR. You then need to run the command
lilo -v
to actually install the bootloader. If it did not get written to the MBR, there's something wrong with your /etc/lilo.conf. Just post its contents and someone will be able to tell you how to fix it.
Ok, well I "kinda" figured it out...
I did what you said in order to create that bootsect.lnx file and then I used this command "# mcopy /bootsect.lnx a:" to copy it to a floppy disk. Then I booted into Windows XP and told it to show hidden folders and system files, I opened up c:\boot.ini with notepad (and turned of word wrap) and then I pasted "c:\bootsect.lnx="Slackware Linux" as the last line. I rebooted the system and I was given the menu that asks you to select your OS and I selected "Slackware Linux" and pressed enter. Then all I got was a screen that said "L" and that's all it said, nothing else happens after that.... What did I do wrong?
So, now I am gonna give what you said a try instead. I'll post what the lilo.conf file contains in just a few minutes if I can figure that out.
Well my Windows image location may be incorrect, b/c I added that in the past.. and I don't know if I have it setup where it will choose automatically (fast detect) or if it will give me like 30 seconds or so to choose the option I want.
By the way, my /dev/hde (80GB hdd with Windows installed on it) does work, b/c Windows will still boot from it. Lately I have been getting into Linux by using the bootdisk (floppy) that it created, but of course I don't want to continue doing it this way.
hmm. that's beyond my abilities. it has problems with the geometry of the hd or something like that.
You might try grub instead of lilo - I don't know much about grub b/c I've never used it but I'm sure there are tons of threads here dealing with installing grub.
Well, I may have found the answer to this! Though I have not tried it yet, I will soon. While in KDE, I took a look at Control Center --> System Administration --> Linux Kernel. Linux Kernel has plenty of settings you can easily enable/disable, etc... Then I went to ATA/IDE/MFM/RLL support --> IDE, ATA and Atapi Block devices --> Auto Geometry Resizing support. This sections info says the following:
Quote:
CONFIG_IDEDISK_STROKE
Should you have a system w/ an AWARD Bios and your drives are larger than 32GB and it will not boot, one is required to perform a few OEM operations first. The option is called "STROKE" because it allows one to "soft clip" the drive to work around a barrier limit. For Maxtor drives it is called "jumpon.exe". Please search Maxtor's web-site for "JUMPON.EXE". IBM has a similar tool at: <http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/support/download.htm>.
I have a Western Digital drive, I will read more into this but I think I am going to give it a try.
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