Quote:
Originally posted by frkstein
I lent my Mandrake 8.1 discs to a friend so he could get a feel for the Linux experience which I have been crowing about since I was turned onto it about a year ago. Whereas, I had only a few easily correctable problems, he seems to be having more trouble with the installation. What it boils down to is he is making a dual boot system where linux is to be installed on a second drive. During the installation process he gets to the point where it should ask which boot loader he wants (Lilo, Grub). It doesn't. It jumps straight to configuring X. When the install finishes and he boots the system, the machine just boots into windows as if Linux was not installed on the second drive. Any thoughts on what my friend can try to get this to work?
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Usually, you run into boot loader problems when you have two disks, your Linux system is on the second disk, and you install the boot loader to the second disk. That's fine, you have a boot loader on the partition containing your Linux software. But typically, you want the boot loader on the Master Boot Record (MBR) to control which systems get booted.
How do you get around this problem? Well, if you can boot the Mandrake system either from CD or from floppy, you cfan correct this problem.
First, run the Mandrake boot program from the Mandrake Control Center to detect all the systems, write out the changes, then exit. To be absolutely sure that Mandrake did what you want, if you're using grub, you can force an installation. Often, what I do is install it in TWO places - both the MBR and the partition containing Mandrake - like this:
/usr/sbin/grub-install /dev/hda7
This puts a boot loader on my Mandrake partition.
/usr/sbin/grub-install /dev/hda
This puts a boot loader on the MBR.
Just in case Mandrake isn't getting things right, here's a sample of a GRUB menu file from /boot/grub/menu.lst that works when Mandrake is on the 7th partition of the first disk and Windows is on the first partition of the first disk.
Change the partition locations, and you'll have a working file. Change the kernel names to point to the kernel version you're using (you can find that in the directory /boot). Hopefully that'll be enough to help you get it all working.
timeout 10
color black/cyan yellow/cyan
i18n (hd0,6)/boot/grub/messages
keytable (hd0,6)/boot/us.klt
altconfigfile (hd0,6)/boot/grub/menu.once
default 0
title linux
kernel (hd0,6)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda7 quiet devfs=mount hdd=ide-scsi hdb=ide-scsi vga=788
initrd (hd0,6)/boot/initrd.img
title linux-nonfb
kernel (hd0,6)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda7 devfs=mount hdd=ide-scsi hdb=ide-scsi
initrd (hd0,6)/boot/initrd.img
title failsafe
kernel (hd0,6)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda7 failsafe devfs=nomount hdd=ide-scsi hdb=ide-scsi
initrd (hd0,6)/boot/initrd.img
title windows
root (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1
title floppy
root (fd0)
chainloader +1
