bah! damn windows!!

Aman9090 · 09-21-2002, 11:45 AM

I wanted to install red hat 7.3. I did. I wiped out my partition for windows and then installed red hat. Success. After that, I play around, and then decide its time to install that crummy windows xp so that I can play all my games. It says that I can't install it without wiping out one of my partitions. It has a maximum of three that xp allows. I see the root partition for linux, and the swap. I also see a mysterious 500mb partition for who knows what. I delete it

. Dumb idea

Anyways, windows works ok, but does not show the dual boot screen like it promised. I am left with a half partitioned hard drive, and no access to linux. Now i think to myself, i can delete the linux partitions, make them unallocated, and then install red hat again, and use lilo as the boot manager. Wrong again. I can't boot into the installation with my cd anymore. The first time I attempted this, it said that windows had an error, and that I could insert the windows cd to fix the problem. Well, I try again, and now it just simply boots to windows without giving me the choice to boot from the cd. It is just completely worthless. Says no boot record for cd, goes to flopy, and then hard drive. Nothing. I try to boot into the windows xp cd. And guess what, it works. Is this a windows issue? A hard drive issue? Not a cd rom drive issue. BIOS problem? How do I fix this stupid mess up? I have another hard drive, and can install windows or linux, or whichever on it, but the problem is that I cannot boot into the linux installation cd. I would prefer to have windows and linux on the same hard drive but different partitions.

lynch · 09-21-2002, 12:00 PM

Sounds like you deleted the /boot partition.Go into bios and set 1st boot device to cdrom.
lynch

Aman9090 · 09-21-2002, 12:09 PM

but it wont let me do that! thats the problem..

LeeZo1200 · 09-21-2002, 07:25 PM

ah. that sounds like the windows i know.

Aman9090 · 09-22-2002, 11:59 AM

yes but i want an answer to my problem. Should I just start from the beginning? Install xp, and THEN linux, and use lilo as manager?

MasterC · 09-22-2002, 12:09 PM

If you have nothing that you can't get back easily (that sentence sucks, if you aren't worried about losing everything - translation) then format em all, blank em. Partition as you'd like, then install suckmycomputerXP and follow it up with RH.

Cool

Aman9090 · 09-22-2002, 02:55 PM

thx master c!

do u think i can just format the one hard drive i want to use? i dont want to lose 8 or 9 gigs of mp3s here..

Aman9090 · 09-22-2002, 02:58 PM

I also heard that lilo doesnt like NT operating systems... possibly use GRUB?

Faecal · 09-22-2002, 05:15 PM

Absolutely you only need to do the first HD. Nothing at the boot-level cares about your other disk.

I always do windows first. If you really wanted to be perverse you could do linux first, with a little fiddling, but it's really not worth the effort if you know you're going to want both.

Aman9090 · 09-22-2002, 06:32 PM

but does lilo like win xp? i heard that it really has screwed some things up...

R0N1N · 09-22-2002, 06:52 PM

Lilo will work fine as long as you install it AFTER any of your windows installs. I have never had a problem with lilo booting any windows os.

Quest · 09-23-2002, 02:12 AM

I had the same problem too...........installed rh7.3 over winxp but the bootload GRUB cannot load........i just show "GRUB" with a black screen.......btw during installion if rh7.3 the duke reported tat my sda(winxp drive) is inconsistance, izzit normal?

Amerist · 09-24-2002, 07:11 AM

Here's how it's done:

1. Install WinXP on one hard drive (or primary partition)
2. Install RH 7.3 on the second hard drive (or seconday partition)

During the Install for RH 7.3, there is a bootloader configuration screen where you get to decide where the bootloader will reside. Use GRUB as your bootloader, put it in the MBR, and this is the key to making it all work: Make sure you give the windows partition/drive a label! That's the most important part because without a label, the Windows partition will not appear in the GRUB bootloader (although it is still accessible if you forgot to do this step) and you will not be able to boot into Windows XP.

I will add another post here with my grub configuration file so you can see how mine looks. I sucessfully set my computer up with two seperate hard drives. /hda is Windows XP and /hdb is my Linux drive. If you have more questions I would like to help.

Amerist · 09-24-2002, 11:07 AM

As promised, here is my /etc/grub.conf

Code:

# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE:  You have a /boot partition.  This means that
#          all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg.
#          root (hd1,0)
#          kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/hdb2
#          initrd /initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/hda
default=1
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd1,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title Red Hat Linux 7.3 (Kernel 2.4.18-10)
	root (hd1,0)
	kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.18-10 ro root=/dev/hdb2 hdd=ide-scsi
	initrd /initrd-2.4.18-10.img
title Windows XP Professional
	rootnoverify (hd0,0)
	chainloader +1

MasterC · 09-24-2002, 02:08 PM

I know I shouldn't start this war, but here I go...

LILO and GRUB are of course, simply user preference, since now either one will work with any configuration (that I know of anyway). So...

GRUB really seems too "cryptic" and not really anything that makes sense. LILO might seem that way too, but if you look at lilo, and edit lines and "think" you know what you are doing from the sound of the line, most likely (if you know a little bit about linux) you are going to be ok. Example:

There's a line in some lilo.conf files called 'default'. What would the average user think that would mean when referring to a boot loader? Maybe the default OS. So making the entry 'default = winbloze' would cause winbloze to boot by default. And so on.

I know that grub is similar, and can do the same things, but it all just doesn't seem to fit well in the swing of things, to me anyway. Again, this is all simly user pref, and my pref is Lilo.

I am happy to hear arguments for the other side, just please keep em friendly

Cool