Hello,

I'm very new to Linux and I'm having quite the time getting my system to boot into it.

I'm running windows XP Pro on my main hard drive which is "hde" my second hard drive "hda" is where I have installed both Red Hat 9 and Mandrake 9.2 both using the Lilo boot loader.

I have created boot disks in both but I cannot get them to boot even while using the boot disks. I get errors basically saying that it can find the linux installations.

I would assume that since my initial boot drive is the windows xp drive "hde" that it is looking at that boot.ini file and never seeing the Lilo boot management.

Here is my question how can I modify my boot.ini file in Windows XP on the "hde" drive to allow me to dual boot to the two linux OS's? Or is that even possible using a second hard drive.

One other thing is that the main hard drive is being connected using some kind of strange cable that came with a new Dell. The second hard drive is using the primary IDE port off the main board and the secondary off the mainboard is connected to the CDRW in the system.

I can't think of any more details to give you other than a sample of my current boot.ini which is as follows.

[boot loader]
timeout=5
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

well if i were you i would delete one of the linux distro and reinstall it again because I think you are really really confusing the computer, as you are running so many OS.
Anyway why do you use two linux OS??

I'm running the two linux distributions because I'm doing a comparison of linux desktops to choose one or two to beta test in our work environment. We are currently running Windows 2000 almost everywhere with the exception of a couple win98 machines and a couple of XP Pro machines. uninstalling will do me no good either unfortunately, I've tried that, I re-installed Red Hat three times before I finally installed Mandrake to see if I would have any better luck. I think like I said that the problem is I don't know where to point the boot.ini file to find the linux installs.

Thanks

Hi,

I used a different approch. I used the Bios to select the disk to boot the one where I have my two Linux partitions. Then, after the Red Hat has booted, I logged as root and edited the "/boot/grub/grub.conf" file ( I do not use LILO, I selected GRUB diring the install).
There I put the "black magic" you can find on the man pages of grub, about booting other OSs:

title WXP
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
rootnoverify (hd1, 0)
chainloader +1


Save it, and reboot. Now you will have this new "WXP" option on the boot screen and you can even put it as a default after the timeout.

Hope this helps.

When you say how you need to know how to setup boot.ini which is a windows file to boot linux, to put it simply you can't. The use of boot.ini is by windows, to boot windows and only windows. Load grub or lilo onto the master boot record of your hard drive that is your master on your primary cable and this should sove your problem. If you don't want to overwrite your MBR then make a lilo boot floppy, which is another solution.

Hope this helps.

Thanks much for the help everyone