I am currently dual booting Win2k and RedHat 8, but neither will boot each other. Grub hangs when trying to boot Windows' Boot.ini Loader and the Boot.ini loader hangs trying to boot Grub.

Windows is installed on a Promise tx2000 raid controller with one mirrored array that has two partitions, windows is on partition 0, ntfs. RedHat 8 is installed on a single drive connected to the Mother board Primary IDE as master/single.

I can boot either operating system by choosing the boot drive with the motherboard boot menu.

To attempt to boot linux from windows I made a RedHad.Bin file using dd to copy the linux boot block from /boot
if I boot the machine from a floppy with only the redhat.bin file on it it will load and work. If I copy the same .bin file to windows c: and point boot.ini to it using c:\redhat.bin="red hat 8" all I get is the letters GRUB in the upper left of the screen, Grub hangs?

Conversly when booting to the linux drive and choosing the Grub windows option the commands grub uses to load windows appears on the screen and then hangs.
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
makeactive
chainload +1

I know the Promise Raid controller is installed in Linux properly as I can mount the ntfs volumes in linux (read only).

Any Ideas why they won't boot each other?

Currently I am booting by inserting a floppy that has my redhat.bin file on it when I want linux and removing it when I want windows (mb boot order: Floppy, Raid, IDE 0 to get that to work) I would like to stop having to use the floppy and get one of the menus to work.

Both Grub and Lilo have problems with RAID. The most likely option is to put your bootloader on the IDE primary drive and boot that. Since you are already doing that with Grub and it doesn't work I suggest trying Lilo.

Try modifying your grub entry for WinXP to look like this:
Worked for me. Good luck!

kc8tbe your grub lines worked, I can now boot to the linux drive and use grub to load either windows or redhat. Thanks.

It appears to be the map (hd1) (hd0) line that was the key. For the sake of knowing, any idea what that line does?

Thanks again.

Windows likes to think that it's the primary partition on the primary master. "makeactive 1" fools windows into thinking its on the primary partition by making that partition active. The "map" command maps one hard drive onto another, fooling windows into thinking that its on the primary master.

The trick comes with a cost, though. You will (probably) be unable to use partitioning utilities from Windows. If you need to partition from windows, use your system BIOS to boot windows rather than GRUB.

I have a very similar setup as the first post on this thread. I installed RH 9 on a single IDE master. My Windows OSes are on a Promise Motherboard ATA RAID. I can now boot RH fine but Windows will not boot even with the emergency boot disk I created before I started (smart huh?) .

Do I need to install Linux drivers for Promise RAID even though I have no need to see the Windows drives when in Linux? I don't care what bootloader I use as long as I can get to each of the OSes.

Thanks

i have a similar problem.
i used ghost to copy my hdd from a scsi to an ide drive, which has win xp pro on it, and is the primary drive. my secondary scsi has redhat v9 on it, and now, i can't boot the ide drive, because on the xp loading screen, i get a flash of blue, and then a restart.
however, if i try to set it up as a slave with my scsi's, grub hangs. whats causing this / how can i fix it, any one know?

lilo, and probably other boot loaders also, places a disk address in the MBR showing where to start loading executable code. When you make changes to the boot portion of your system you have to rerun lilo so that it can set up this address again, among other reasons.

When you copy a disk, the new disk may not have the same geometry as the old and so the disk address in the new disk MBR is not valid. So lilo fails.

I expect other bootloaders might have the same problem.