i need help with booting my new drive

spiderworm · 10-07-2003, 11:39 PM

i posted earlier but realized my post was probably too ambiguous for me to get much help. so i'm going to give it another try.

i have a dual boot win2000/mandrake linux 9.1 hard drive. windoze, as it usually does, got corrupted somehow and became completely unusable. no problem, i thought, i'll just pop out my dual boot drive, pop in my extra 60 gig, install windoze, pop my dual boot drive back in, and change where lilo looked for windows. easy, right? not so easy.

here's the windoze entry in lilo.conf:

other=/dev/hdb1
label="windows"

it also used to have table=/dev/hdb1 as well, i'm not sure what that did but i deleted it. with the table=/dev/hdb1 line, every time i ran lilo -t i would get a "Partition entry not found" error. with that gone i ran lilo -t fine, then i ran /sbin/lilo, rebooted and it still booted into the old windoze install on the dual boot (hda1).

what the hell? i've checked out /dev/hdb1, everything seems good in there. i can mount it, etc. any ideas?

ty,
spiderworm

J.W. · 10-08-2003, 01:35 AM

spider - not enough info, bro. What exactly do you want to end up with, a dual boot Win/Linux machine, or a single boot Windows, or a single boot Linux?

One possibility that you might consider is just to wipe the entire machine, and reinstall as many OS(s) on it from scratch as you wish to have. Can you provide some additional info on what you are trying to set up? -- J.W.

slakmagik · 10-08-2003, 02:31 AM

Sounds like he wants to dual-boot Win and Mandrake by sticking a new drive with Windows on it to replace the fubared system and still use Mandrake.

Try

other = /dev/hdb1
label = Windows
table = /dev/hdb [no '1']

But first thing is to make sure your cables, jumpers, and whatnot - the physical hardware - is good to go. Is it on the same ribbon or is it hdc or hdd? Etc. And this assumes the Windows on the new drive is not screwed up, and so on.

Also, give your new Windows a different name. Like 'newwin'. That way if 'lilo -t' says 'added windows' you know it isn't working right at that point. If it says 'added newwin' you know that much is right.

spiderworm · 10-08-2003, 12:14 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by digiot
Sounds like he wants to dual-boot Win and Mandrake by sticking a new drive with Windows on it to replace the fubared system and still use Mandrake.

Yes, thats exactly what I want.

Quote:

Try

other = /dev/hdb1
label = Windows
table = /dev/hdb [no '1']

But first thing is to make sure your cables, jumpers, and whatnot - the physical hardware - is good to go. Is it on the same ribbon or is it hdc or hdd? Etc. And this assumes the Windows on the new drive is not screwed up, and so on.

Also, give your new Windows a different name. Like 'newwin'. That way if 'lilo -t' says 'added windows' you know it isn't working right at that point. If it says 'added newwin' you know that much is right.

Tried that, the entry in lilo.conf looks like this:

other=/dev/hdb1
label="Win2000"
table=/dev/hdb

running lilo -t and lilo showed Win2000, returned no error messages, but when I rebooted and tried to boot win2000 at the lilo startup, it still sent me to the old windoze install!

im positive the new drive with windows boots perfectly, i can disconnect the linux drive and boot into windows without a problem.

my hard drives are connected to the motherboard in the following manner:
ide 0 Master = mandrake linux 9.1 & the old fubared copy of windoze i dont want to use anymore
ide 0 Slave = new drive, has windows installed on it, boots beautifully when linux drive isnt plugged in
ide 1 Master = none for now
ide 1 Slave = cd rom

What the hell could I be doing wrong???

spiderworm

aaa · 10-08-2003, 12:26 PM

Quote:

no problem, i thought, i'll just pop out my dual boot drive, pop in my extra 60 gig, install windoze, pop my dual boot drive back in, and change where lilo looked for windows. easy, right? not so easy.

How did you go about popping in your extra 60 gig? (ie which ide channel)
I think, if you installed your new Win2k as hda, then put it as hdb later, the boot.ini file still contains references to hda, thinking that's it's drive, since that's how it was installed. This would cause it to boot from hda1 instead of hdb1:
LILO>points to hdb1>hdb1's NTLDR thinks it's on hda, gets it's files from hda1, boots hda1.

spiderworm · 10-08-2003, 03:00 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by aaa
How did you go about popping in your extra 60 gig? (ie which ide channel)
I think, if you installed your new Win2k as hda, then put it as hdb later, the boot.ini file still contains references to hda, thinking that's it's drive, since that's how it was installed. This would cause it to boot from hda1 instead of hdb1:
LILO>points to hdb1>hdb1's NTLDR thinks it's on hda, gets it's files from hda1, boots hda1.

when i installed windows, i plugged in the new hard drive as ide 0 slave, unplugged the ide 0 master (the linux/corrupt windows drive), and installed it. so windows was installed as the slave drive. you said something about boot.ini, where do i look for and/or edit that?

spiderworm

spiderworm · 10-08-2003, 08:08 PM

heres my boot.ini file on the new windows hard drive, just in case this helps:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Profesional" /fastdetect

i cant honestly say i understand everything thats going on here, but if theres some changes i need to make, please let me know what they are and why.

thanx for everybody's help,
spiderworm

WingNut · 10-08-2003, 08:52 PM

So you have one disk with MDK 9.1 and corrupted windows AND an extra 60 giger. You unplugged the corrupt drive, plugged in the new drive and installed windows, then plugged in the old drive and went for a drive but the car wouldn't start. Very, Very likely Windows' partition info thinks it is on the primary hard drive regardless of jumpers or its location on the cable. It is not uncommon for a "slave" HDD NOT to boot when it is the only drive on the system. Many times, if a drive is not jumpered properly BIOS will simply not see it.

I think what the penguins above are getting at is that LILO (unless I'm unaware of some very cool updates) will not actually boot Win2K it will only call Win2K's boot loader at which time you will AGAIN select the operating system. That is where boot.ini comes in. But if LILO thinks /dev/hdb1 but Windows says "I'm on the primary drive" then you have yourself a real show stopper.

I agree with the above advise. Clean install the whole box but DO NOT remove any of the HDD's. If part of your old dual boot is corrupted then I'm guessing your wasting a substantial portion of that HDD as simply dead space. That way you can install what ever OS to what ever HDD since Win2K doesn't just have to be on primary and LILO should set it self up properly from the get go IF you install Win2K first. But you will still have to activate the Win2K bootloader. If you install Linux first then Windows; I believe 2K will atleast know it is in a dual boot environment and activate its bootloader. All you have to do then is configure LILO. If you do it by hand run the command /sbin/lilo after your done with configuaration. Also look to draktools where you can RE set up lilo with a niffty gui. Also you can look at your current partition scheme provided both drives were in the system when you installed Linux.

Do a google for linux win2k dual boot and you should find some detailed howto's.

Sorry for the length of the post but you can do this in different ways. The moral of the story is if your going to dual boot accross two HDD's (which I do) have them both in the system when you install and let the OS do at least some of the work for you.

slakmagik · 10-09-2003, 04:36 AM

You could just try changing the two 'rdisk(0)' entries to 'rdisk(1)'. People say Windows won't boot unless it's the first partition on the primary drive. I *know* that's false regarding partitions. It presumably is for drives, too. I thought aaa had it right and it looks like he(?) did.

spiderworm · 10-10-2003, 12:14 AM

alrighty, heres what i'm going to do about this.

1) i'm going to use linux to copy all of my important files from the old windoze install (hda1) to the new windoze install (hdb1).

2) i'm going to format the old windows install (hda1), turn it into nfs or something. it seems the old windoze bootloader on hda is blocking or overriding the new windows bootloader on hdb. i'm hoping that will destroy whatever it is i need to destroy on hda to keep it from doing that in the future.

3) i'm going to re-run /sbin/lilo, then reboot and see if lilo sends me to the right bootloader.

if this doesnt work, the next thing i'll try will be to make the new windows drive master and the linux drive slave, then do... something, i'm not sure what, that will ... oh hell i dont know what i'm doing

anybody have any feedback on this? let me know, and as always, thanx for the help.

spiderworm

geoff_f · 10-10-2003, 03:38 AM

That sounds like a good plan. When (or IF) you get to the stage of swapping drives as master/slave, keep in mind that your drives then swap whether they are hda1/hdb1.

Before you do anything though, post the output of /etc/lilo.conf (all of it). From what you have said, this is your current arrangement:

Code:

ide0:	hda1	Old Windows
	hda2	Linux
ide1:	hdb1	New Windows

I'm betting your lilo.conf still points 'label="Windows"' to hda1, which it would have been originally, and is exactly the sort of thing that would cause your problem.

spiderworm · 10-10-2003, 11:03 AM

Here's lilo.conf (and no, label="win2000" doesn't point to hda)

boot=/dev/hda
map=/boot/map
default="linux"
keytable=/boot/us.klt
prompt
nowarn
timeout=100
message=/boot/message
menu-scheme=wb:bw:wb:bw
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label="linux"
root=/dev/hda3
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append="devfs=mount acpi=off quiet"
vga=788
read-only
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label="linux-nonfb"
root=/dev/hda3
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append="devfs=mount acpi=off"
read-only
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label="failsafe"
root=/dev/hda3
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append="devfs=nomount acpi=off failsafe"
read-only
other=/dev/hdb1
label="win2000"
table=/dev/hdb
other=/dev/fd0
label="floppy"
unsafe

geoff_f · 10-10-2003, 09:21 PM

Drat! foiled again (lol). Your lilo.conf looks OK, so it must be something else. It's quite possible that Windows is being confused by having two instances of the same OS plugged in to the system.

So go with Plan A (erasing contents of old Windows partition). If no joy there, for Plan B I would swap the drives so that your Win2000 drive is primary master, and your linux drive is primary slave, then swap occurrences of 'a' and 'b' in your lilo.conf. Ie, hdb1 becomes hda1, and hda3 becomes hdb3, then see how that goes.

spiderworm · 10-11-2003, 11:08 AM

ok so i went ahead & formatted hda1, changed the filesystem type too, now when i boot & choose win2000, i get the following message:

Invalid BOOT.INI file
Booting from C:/winnt/
NTDETECT failed

it looks like to me that it is still trying to boot windoze from hda! lilo.conf is still pointing to hdb! what could be causing this???

Is there some way of looking at the MBR and finding offending configurations? Where else could the problem be?

and since i formatted hda1, where is my pc getting the instructions to print "Invalid BOOT.INI file.... etc" on the screen?

i feel like i'm so close to getting this!

spiderworm

geoff_f · 10-11-2003, 04:33 PM

How's this for a scenario: Win2000 is happy booting from the Primary Slave when it's the only drive connected, but when there is a Primary Master, it baulks. This would mean that Lilo passes booting duties to the Win2000 bootloader on hdb, it checks that there is a Primary Master, and assumes that Windows has to be on the first partition of the first hard drive, and doesn't find it, so comes up with the error messages you are seeing. (This is not logical behaviour, but we are talking about Windows). It's now time to try Plan B.