dualboot win2k w/ntfs & fedora w/grub?
 

Before I upgraded to Fedora, my Win2k/RH9 2 hard drive system dual booted using the NTLOADER's boot.ini on the NTFS ( hda1) drive. RH9 used LILO on hdc1 so I was able to do

# /bin/dd if=/boot of=/bootsec.lnx bs=512 count=1

then copied bootsec.lnx over to my NTFS directory that contained boot.ini and put in the linux line

C:\bootsect.lnx="Linux"

and the dual boot worked just as it was supposed to.

During the upgrade to Fedora core 1, when asked if I wanted to change my existing bootloader, I accepted. But instead of changing LILO, the upgrade put in Grub which is all very nice, but now my dual boot doesn't work. I suppose I could install LILO, but is there a way using the NTLOADER to start up Grub in the same way that LILO was being started?

Thanks,

In what way, exactly is your dual-boot broken? Does it load GRUB first, which fails to load Windows or does ntldr load first but then pass off to a broken GRUB config?

Your solution will be different depending on what the symptoms are. One thing occurs to me, though: It's been a while since I used ntldr to boot Linux, but are you sure you're supposed to use /boot as your if and not /dev/hdX (whichever drive has grub in its MBR)?

See, the idea is for ntldr to be able to hand off to a third-party bootloader and basically make the second bootloader behave as though it's just been loaded from the bios. The bios loads the stage-1 bootloader from your disk's master boot record (MBR). So if you create a copy of your Linux disk's MBR, ntldr can propperly load the Linux bootloader. The /boot partition just contains the stage-2 bootloader files and the kernel stuff. It doesn't even enter the picture until the first part of GRUB has been loaded, though.

...that's the way I think I remember it working, at least. And a quick google appears to agree.

Tnx for the reply,

"how is dual-boot broken"

Win2k is the original OS; ntloader is the default loader and continues to give me the two options of Win2k and Linux. What no longer works to the Linux choice which fires up c:\bootsec.lnx, the file that I created using the dd command.

When I select "Linux", the characters LINX- appear at the top left corner of an otherwise black screen and then nothing happens. But I was surprized to find that my keyboard is not frozen; I am able to do a Ctl-Alt-Del and re-boot.



"/boot as your if and not /dev/hdX"

I've tried both in the dd statement, but neither have worked.


"stage-1 bootloader from your disk's master boot record (MBR)"

I'm sure this is the problem. I was able to grab it for LILO using the dd, but I'm obviously not for grub. As near as I can remember, I've treated both exactly the same - during installation and then, with the dd - but I'm missing something.