Hi,

I have a PIII, 128 MB RAM, 20 GB HDD.

I created three partitions - one 2 GB partition for DOS, one 9 GB partition for Windows 2000 professional and one 9 GB partition for Linux.

After partioning and installing the respective O.S'es, and after making the relevant entries in boot.ini, I find that though I can boot any O.S, XWindows is extremely slow when I boot from the hard disk. However, on booting Linux from a bootdisk floppy, the startup speed for XWindows is fabulous.

I have searched the net but this seems to be an undocumented problem. ( The problem exists with NT Workstation too instead of Professional. )

Any pointers ?

Just a guess, but this might be because you're using NTLoader to load Linux. Perhaps the Linux kernel image that NTLoader uses is faulty. Try making a new kernel image, and if that doesn't work, I would suggest using LILO. This would load Linux directly, and should (might) solve your problem. (Notice that when the bootdisk loads Linux, it is loading a true kernel image, not one that was exported from Linux for use with DOS.)


~icy

Hi,

Thanks. I used NTLoader to load Linux. The process I used was "standard". i.e using dd if=/dev/hda? of=linux.sys bs=512 count=1 and then transferring this file to boot.ini

The funny thing is that when I have 2 partitions, I don't have this problem ( NT and Linux ) or (Win 2K and Linux). The problem arises ONLY when I have 3 partitions.

The NT Loader in fact loads LILO and does not load the Linux Kernel directly in the method above. There is no way that I know of to DIRECTLY load the linux kernel using NT Loader.

Once I start XWindows, there seems to be no apparent problem thereafter. The problem is ONLY to get XWindows to start. It takes over 8 minutes to initialize ! With the floppy boot, it takes 35 seconds !

Does this help ? Any additional detailes required ?

Thanks for at least trying to help !

Yeah, I thought it loaded LILO, but I wasn't completely sure. (sorry.) Maybe I'll leave this one to the true experts.

~icy

PS: One more thing: check the XFree86.0.log file in /var/log. There might be something in there, though you probably thought about that already.

Sounds like you have tried reinstalling this several times...

Have you tried reordering the partion layout? Put linux first, then dos, then Win2k? I'm not sure that win2k boots from cylinder>1024, and I'm sure that DOS won't, so that may not be workable for you.

What you can do is put the /boot partition on hda1 (only 64M or so), then DOS, then Win2k, then the rest. Linux really should have more than 1 partition to reside in.

Other than further experimentation, I don't know. I haven't seen this before.

Hi,

These are the exact steps I executed on the 18GB hard disk

a) Used a DOS 6.2 boot disk and ran "fdisk /mbr" to wipe out the master boot record (that initially contained some other junk ).

b) Used DOS's fdisk to create a primary DOS partition of 2 GB, and 2 other partitions of 9 GB each.

c) Used DOS's format to format the first partition and then installed DOS ( "format c: /s" works fine unless you have some other junk in the mbr, in which case you need to do "fdisk /mbr" and then "sys c:" )

d) Installed Win 2000 professional on the 2nd partition. The installation process recognizes the existence of DOS and includes it in the NT bootloader ( boot.ini ). It also makes the 2nd partition as the Active partition so that a cold boot always starts the NT loader and not booting from the mbr.

At this point, booting DOS and Win 2K works just fine.

e) Now I started with installing RedHat Linux 7.2 from the CD. I prefer a text/custom install. The installer detects both DOS and Win2K and asks whether the Linux OS loader should be on the MBR or on the 2nd extended partition. I initially said MBR but that made DOS completely redundant. ON trying to boot DOS, it kept saying "OS not found". So I installed Linux on the 2nd partition. I also made a bootable floppy during the end of the install.

f) On now restarting the machine, the NT Loader appears with just the two options ( DOS and Win 2K ). For some reason, the Linux installation process does not make itself as the "active" O.S though the dialog box says exactly that during the install process.

At this point, if I boot with the floppy, I can boot linux successfully and X works fine.

g) I now copied the Linux loader using the commands described above " dd if=... etc. " and then transferred this to the Win 2K's root drive and modified boot.ini.

On rebooting, all 3 Operating Systems can boot. Booting Linux from the NT Loader loads a menu that again shows DOS, Linux and Win 2K. I can oscillate/toggle between NT and Linux loaders as much as I want.

Booting Linux this way causes a drastic drop in X's speed.

I suspect something about the way X works and not the actual booting/partitioning process. Is there an X expert out there ?

Thanks....

Oops, I forgot to answer DFossMeister's specific queries.

a) Reordering the partitions does not work. The same situation exists. Win2K boots from > 1024 not DOS. ( I had LBA enabled ).

b) Actually Linux does reside in more than 1 partition except that these are all above the 10 GB limit. ( I created a separate partition for swap, for home, for usr and the root partition itself ). I did'nt feel that this was relevant to the problem so I said I created a single partition. The actual layout is somewhat as follows:

/dev/hda
/dev/hda1 2 GB FAT DOS
/dev/hda2 8 GB NTFS Win2k
/dev/hda3 512 MB ext2 /
/dev/hda4 256 MB swap
/dev/hda5 2 GB /home
/dev/hda6 ~6 GB /usr