Dual Drive Dual Boot from floppy
 

Hokay! I have my Debian Woody humming nicely on my second drive, bootable. On my first drive is Windows XP Home, bootable. For now, I switch the IDE cable back and forth to access the different OS's.
Would I be able to have both drives plugged in, and use a boot manager from a floppy? If so, what would be the steps?

Thanks in advance for any help!

Lokizen :jawa:

Why of a floppy and not of the MBR of the master drive? You could alter lilo (or grub) to boot both win and linux, and I read up how to do it using the windows bootloader before - so why do it with a floppy? It would be awfully slow in comparison, and floppies are more prone to break...

Well, to keep the windows drive Pure, i wanted to have the boot manager on a floppy, but if i can install lilo on the linux drive, that would work...

yea its quite easy with lilo (as far as I'm aware, never run linux and windows together). Try this (not sure if it will work) replacing /dev/hda1 with the windows partition (hda for master primary, hdb for primary slave)

don't forget to run the lilo command as root aswel

one more question, both the windows drive and the linux drive are fully bootable independantly, and right now i switch the ide cable.
Should i boot linux, connect the other drive, then run lilo?

Thanks for being so helpful,
Lokizen

are they both primary, and which is the master and which is the slave? I would advise linux as the master and windows as the slave (so they are both connected with a ide ribbon that has two ends, if your using ide???) and then install the boot loader on the master

Right now windows is the master, easily switchable, so i'll do that and just run lilo on the new linux master? and yes, i have a two input ide leading to the mobo, a quick swap and linux would be the master.

Yea, stick linux as the master and windows as the slave seen as the bootloader is going to be on the master (and lilo is the LInuxLOader :p, makes more sense?). Add that line to your /etc/lilo.conf (i hope you use lilo now, i dont have a clue how grub works but im using it anyway hehe), run lilo then reboot, test that that you can boot into windows. If you can then you rejoice, else back to step one (unfortunately).

so in that case you lilo.conf should look a little like this:
MAKE SURE:
to change the linux partition root to whatever partition the root file system is on, in this case, /dev/hda6
to change the windows partition if you have c:\ on say hdb5 (if it were a logical partiton)

i wouldn't advise copying this word for word, I gave you this as an example, because a lilo.conf file may be very different for say mandrake than for debian, so you may not even be able to boot linux! When i use gentoo, unless i added the vga resolutions and stuff like that it would hang on boot! a word of warning for you ....

I made the changes, but forgot to change label to windows, i got the Novell Netware on boot, no problem....
I changed the label to relflect windows, made sure to uncomment restricted, and now on boot after checking dmi pool, instead of LILO, I get LI. lol

I'll tackle this problem fresh tonight, until then i need to cogitate. What could be crashing LILO?

I'm fresh out of idears! Post you /etc/lilo.conf see if theres a spelling mistake or something (easily done I kno myself)

Ok. I changed the jumper setting on windows back to master,
both that and linux are set on master, changed bios to boot the linux drive first,
which it does, and lilo'ed so that it saw the windows drive. Now it only boots Linux
until i bios back to the windows drive.
Windows, naturally, doesnt see the linux drive.
But i have an idea, i'll check back.

(idea, set bios for boot only linux drive)

Lokizen :jawa:

That surely isn't safe! you should only have one master on your primary ide controller! Plugging both in will cause trouble, as linux refers to the primary master as /dev/hda so both hard drives will called by this!

I know that its possible to use windows bootloader to boot linux. Google that if you want to try that, I forgot the address I saw it on. I have found some other links though that might help, have a look:

http://www.geocities.com/epark/linux...w2k-HOWTO.html Grub, Linux and windows

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-9-Manual/install-guide/ch-x86-dualboot.html Might be relevent

http://www.littlewhitedog.com/content-52.html Seems like this could be your best bet, have a look there

You should probably read them because it's your system, so you're going to understand how it works better than anyone else, plus you will know how to fix in the future :P