Dual Boot Issues
 

I'm trying to do a dual boot between Windows XP Home Edition and Slackware 10.1. Everytime I write Lilo to the MBR as stated in a thread on this form, I can boot Linux, but not Windows. Can someone post a link for a dual boot Windows/Slackware cause I am tired of having to reinstall?

can you post your " /etc/lilo.conf " -file. ?

egag

post disk and partitioning info too. At least the contents of /etc/fstab; also: the un-fstab'ed disks and partitions.

When I still did windows, I had hda*=>linux and hdb1=>windows

my lilo.conf contained this (plus more, of course):
the problem is that <strike>microsoft is soooo lame</strike> windows needs to be tricked into believing that it's on the first disk, which the above code does.

hth --Jonas Kölker

I'm not even going to bother with this. I like Slackware. I don't want to go back to SuSE cause it had no built in necessary software like GTK and GTK2 and compilers and stuff. SuSE did correctly boot Windows, but there is a bug in 9.2 where you can't even get the monitor to register the resolution due to high refresh rates. I gave up on SuSE and Fedora! Now, I don't use Linux that often for me to even install LILO. GRUB worked great, but I think a standard floppy boot disk would be fine fro me to boot Linux! Thanks.

There is one other way to boot linux, without altering your MBR. Install LILO on the superblock of your Linux partition, and aquire the 512 bytes of the superblock , like so..

I am assuming of course since hdb is windows, then hda must be where linux is, and this command is just an example, on the last part, of=/tmp/bootsect.lnx bs=1 count=512 , you can have the output somewhere else, just make sure you can make a copy of it, to a diskette, or somewhere where windows can see it, such as a FAT32 partition

Next, under windows, copy it to the root directory of your C:\ drive , and then edit boot.ini and add the following

you should also add timeout=30 (30secs) , or how many seconds you want, if that is not present in boot.ini.

Once you reboot you should have a prompt, with the choices of windows or linux. Now, keep in mind that you are using the NTLDR to call upon LILO with the bootsect.lnx file you have just created, this is how I boot, and it works just fine, since I can't install LILO to the MBR either.

I'm going to try and change my boot.ini like Jeebizz said so that I can run the NTLDR to point to LILO and run Slackware.

Yes, but I've run into trouble. My hard drives are as so. I only have one hard drive which is broken into three patitions. hda1 is my Windows XP Home NTFS partition. hda2 is my Linux swap partition. hda3 is where my Slackware Linux is.

Do I then just give this command to get the bootsect.lnx?

dd if=/dev/hda3 of=/tmp/bootsect.lnx bs=1 count=512

Yep - personally, I'd just write it straight to a floppy.
Each to their own.

You guys are the best; i got it working!

The only downside to using the Windows bootmanager is that if your Windows goes kaput, you'll have to set it up all over again, and you may or may not have the appropriate disks to boot into Linux again.

I only say this, because my own Windows installation has an annoying habit of dying at the most inopportune times.

It's actually pretty easy to get LILO working pointing to another OS. Then if you need to reinstall your Windows (or restore from a compressed image like I do), just unpack and you won't need to update your lilo.conf or boot menu. In my case, the Windows section of lilo.conf looks like this:

LILO is installed to /dev/hde2, which is the primary boot partition on the drive. The Windows partition is *not* bootable. 9 times out of 10, the reason you can't get Lilo to dualboot Windows is because you've got the wrong partition flagged as bootable.