Dual booting windows & linux
 

I have 3 hard drives. One has Red Hat 7.2. One has Windows 98. The other has Windows XP. I can't get the system to dual boot correctly, here's the situation:

I connect just Windows 98 -> boots fine

I connect just Windows XP -> boots fine

I connect just linux -> boots fine

I connect 98 & XP -> boots into XP

I connect 98 & linux -> LILO says dos or linux. linux boots fine, if I choose DOS it seems to work at first but then just sits with a blinking cursor in the top left.

I connect XP & linux -> Sits at the screen where it says <Hit F2 to go into setup>. If I go into setup, there is no hard drive detected.

Each OS was installed separately (Meaning there was no other hard drive with another OS while I installed one of them). So when I installed linux, the other two hard drives were disconnected.

I added to lilo.conf:
other=/dev/hdb1
label=dos

Any ideas?

Most PCs have 2 IDE controller channels with a master-slave device capability on each. That means, you could connect 3 hard-disks as well as a CD-ROM device. I'm not sure why you are reassembling your system when you could have it all connected and choose from a boot loader in either ( I prefer linux ) of those disks.

You need to figure out your primary IDE bus, and start plugging in your linux hd at the end of the ribbon ( master ). Make sure you have the drive jumpered to 'bus setting' before you do this. Then plug the other drives in and configure your boot loader.

Sometimes 1 of the hard drives aren't detected in the BIOS. It depends where I hook it in, and what the other hard drive is.

If I install linux while I have a Windows XP drive hooked up, where should I install LILO so that each drive can still boot on its own without the other being hooked in?

EDIT: Ooh, and now I can't boot from my linux drive, it just makes this clicking noise.

>Sometimes 1 of the hard drives aren't detected in the BIOS. It depends where I hook it in, and what the other hard drive is.
Check your jumper settings on all hard drives. If you jumper a drive to assume it is the master and then connect it to a channel with a similar ( master) drive on it, the BIOS will go insane. Check your hard-drive manuals to jumper them to 'bus select' and then control master/slave with positioning on the cable. ( the one at the end of the ribbon on each channel is the master, the other is slave )

>If I install linux while I have a Windows XP drive hooked up, where should I install LILO so that each drive can still boot on its own without the other being hooked in?
Make Linux the primary master. All problems will be solved.

>EDIT: Ooh, and now I can't boot from my linux drive, it just makes this clicking noise.
If it is just the linux drive.. hardware issue?

I would have to agree with nxny change to cable select and it the BIOS will not have the issue seeing the drives. I had the same issue with a docking bay for my hard driver. One was Master on the jumpers and the other was Slave. When I had both drives installed it booted into Windows fine, when I pulled the docking drive which was the Slave BIOS took forever to find my other hard drive and then Windows didn't boot up. It wasn't until I change to cable select on the jumper did it work with one driver or both.

I had a similar issue after installing redhat 7.1. I had 2 hard drives, the primary with win 2k and the slave with redat. Red hat would boot fine but any time i tried to boot to win2k it would take an extreamly long time. I simply disabled the linux hard drive in the device manager and it took care of the problem. I think the issue was that windows was trying to read the linux partition table, and hanging when it failed to do so since windows will not see this partition information. I did however install the grub boot loader to the win2k MBR, so I am not sure if this is the same as this situation.