I just installed RedHat on an extended partition on the same drive that I have WinXP. I had planned to do a dual boot, but now I can't boot to RH.

I created a boot floppy at installation, then once install was done went to boot to the floppy. I get a boot failure error and I can only boot to WinXP. Is there any way to get around this or am I going to have to reinstall RH?

I've not been having any luck with this computer all weekend.

Thanks.

Could you copy the error message you got?

Sure. When it tries to boot it says:

Loading initrd.img....
Boot failed: please change disks and press a key to continue.

Is it looking for something else?

If i was you i would first try to make another bootfloppy. Maybe your floppy itself is damaged.

How do I do that?

Try
mkbootdisk kernel_version

Or if you want an easier way.

Boot from cd and type linux upgrade. Now if you press Next a couple of times then it will make the boot floppy for you. After that you will have to stop the upgrade process by rebooting and try your new floppy.

I tried creating a new boot disk using the upgrade procedure and this floppy didn't even get to initrd.img

it just said:
Loading

then gave me the same error

any other ideas?

I really would like to dual boot but if that doesn't work, I guess I'll be back to running it inside of VMWare.

Also tried to reinstall in text mode and it made a boot disk that was worse than the graphical mode.

I'm thinking of backing up all data to cds (probaby about 15-20) then repartitioning the entire drive.

Could my problem be that when it gets to partition setup, it tells me the partition table is incorrect? Both mandrake 9.0 and redhat 7.3 did this when I tried to install them.

Ideally I'd like to get Mandrake on there, but I also had problems when it was trying to install packages from disk 2. could be my copy isn't quite right, even though I can browse it via windows.

Which bootloader did you try to install (Grub, Lilo)? Get a copy of Tom's rtbt, boot from the floppy, mount your /boot or / partition, look in your /boot/grub/menu.lst, or /etc/linux.conf, file and post a copy of it here.

I tried to install LILO to the first sector of the root partition. It appears correct. It is installed to /dev/hda3 which should be / and /dev/hda4 should be the swap. hda1 and 2 are my Windows partitions.


I looked over tomsrtbt but don't understand how to do this. Since I do not have access to a Win95/98/DOS/Linux machine and it says you can't create it with Win2K or WinXP. How do I do this?

Could I need to use the LBA option?

That's the reason why you can't get to your Linux space. The BIOS and its bootstrap loader go to the MBR of the bootable device to look for boot code. What it found was code that sends it to the Windoze partition.

You can do one of two things: 1) send Lilo to the MBR of your primary hard drive with a lilo.conf that points to your Windoze space and to your Mandrake space

or

2) make a copy of your Linux partition bootsector to a file, copy that file to your WinXP C: drive, and add an entry to your boot.ini file for Mandrake.

ok. Here is what I did:

Using rescue mode, I booted with the CD.

mounted the floppy drive.
typed: dd if=dev/hda3 of=mnt/floppy/boot.lnx bs=512 count=1

told me all was well. to be sure, I went into that dir and viewed it. boot.lnx was in there.

Booted to XP, copied boot.lnx to C:\ and added C:\boot.lnx="Linux RedHat 7.3" to the file, saved it and rebooted.

Sure enough I have both options in my Boot Menu. Select the linux option and i get a black screen with a blinking cursor in the top left corner of the screen.

What have I missed?

Are you sure you have lilo on /dev/hda3? If possible, send your /etc/lilo.conf