RH9 and WinXP_seperate drives dual boot + XP wireless network hardly works anymore?
 

Can anyone out there help please?!

I am relatively new to Linux but am experienced with Windows. Wanting to learn Linux/unix in general I have added another hard drive to my Windows XP system and installed Red Hat 9 on it.

I initally had my Win XP Pro HD set as the Master with a second drive as the slave. So I have left the config like this and just installed Rhat9 on the slave drive using LILO as the boot loader.
Expecting lots of problems I was pleasantly surprised for it all to go well and me to be offered a RedHat Screen giving me the choice of which OS to boot into!

So far so good. Except when I boot in to XP Pro my wireless network no longer works properly and I cant get internet,network etc
Before installing Linux I had a fully operational Netgear WG311 wireless pci card connecting to my Netgear dg834g wireless router. My internet etc all worked perfectly and I could network with other computers on the network.
Since the install of RH9 on to the slave drive my wireless card at first worked but the internet was very intermittent. After a few reboots my wireless connection would not work at all on this machine although everything else in both OS's seems to be fine (except I havent got round to sorting all of the hardware drivers for linux yet due to this problem).

I tried disconnecting my second hd(the slave with RH9) on it but I just get the 'L' for LILO after the post check and thats all!

I really want to keep both Linux and XP on the seperate drives if I can egt my wireless going but if not can anyone tell me how to get XP to boot up on it's own again?
All of the XP drive filesystem is NTFS and I have not modified the boot.ini - do I need to just install compatible wifi drivers for my linux install? Surely not. Surely hardware in XP should not be affected by Linux compatibility problems?? Please Help!

Thaks in Advance

The 'L' means - The first stage boot loader has been loaded and started, but it can't load the second stage boot loader. The two-digit error codes indicate the type of problem. (See also the LILO Disk Error Codes section, below.) This condition usually indicates a media failure or bad disk parameters in the IPCop PC's BIOS.

Try formating your Master Boot Record, in windows I believe the commands is 'fixmbr'

Re: How to Dual boot rh9 and XP on seperate drives
 

Thanks for the Lilo info. I was about to rewrite the mbr in xp to let me just access my xp drive when I noticed that the antennae on my Netgear wg311 wireless card was slightly loose!!! (ummm.I wonder which tw*t did that!?)
Anyway, I tightened it up and lo and behold - a fully functioning wireless network in XP and a fully functioning linux (red hat 9) install on my second hard drive! As soon as I can find a suitable driver for my wg311v2 for linux I will get the network going in Linux (much more stable I feel - no unexplainable connection dropoffs!)

The moral of the story?? For anyone out there unsure as to whether a dual drive dual boot install is a good plan........Well it is!

Just install Windows Xp (I used pro) on your first drive and set it to master. Set your second drive to slave and install Red Hat 9 (in my case - and it has to be a newish kernel for Lilo to work with XP/ntfs I believe?) on to your second drive while installing Lilo as the bootloader during the install.
The installer will recognise the two hard drives present in your machine - obviously just select the slave drive that you intend to install Linux on to!
Follow the install procedure....Reboot.. and hey presto... a linux boot selection screen from which you choose your preffered OS (for that boot)
Also, the Red Hat install gives you the option to set either Windows or Linux as the default OS if you don't select one and also the timeout for the selection screen.

I have a similar problem - two hard drives with Windows and Linux:
Hard drive 1: 160GB, 3 partitions, Win98, Win2000, WinXP.
Hard drive 2: 30GB, 1 partition, Red Hat Linux 7.2

When I initially installed using GRUB, the install process went smooth - I chose to load the boot partition to the MBR of my Windows hard drive. But when I rebooted, all I got was "GRUB hard disk error".

Next, I reinstalled Linux using LILO. Again I loaded to the MBR. This time when I rebooted, all I got was "L".

Am I having the problem of the Linux boot partition being located above the 1024 cylinder limitation? If so, how can I fix that?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!!!