dual boot issues
 

okay, heres the issue. i have 2 diffent hd's. one has windows xp home, which i am really good at using, and do all kinds of shit with. and the other is running mandrake 9.2, which i am learning at a farely fast paced rate. now, heres the first issue, i cant get lilo to show windows for the boot selections. i put the windows on master and the linux on slave and it will automatically boot windows. if i change the bios to the slave boots first it will go to lilo and linux. but it wont show the windows. how do i get it so i can simply choose without having to go into the bios and change it? heres the specs:
a epia-m board
80 gig seagate baracuda windows
20 gig seagate baracuda linux
256 ram
cd drive, blah blah blah
the windows is xp, the linux is mandrake 9.2.
i am truithfully liking it but dont like the console and am gonna change it to boot normally to text mode so i can learn. maybe work with x windows. okay, any help would be nice. i am still a major newb with linux but am already loving it.

Get yourself a copy of BootMagic. Works great!! That is what I have used for many years. The only real problem in using Bootmagic with WinXP is that Bootmagic cannot be installed on a NTFS partition. What I did is create a 100meg FAT partition using Partition Magic and installed it onto that.

Anyway that is one option.

Apparently, you didn't install Mandrake with the Windows drive hooked up, or you wouldn't have this trouble.

You will need to install lilo to the mbr of the master drive. Make sure you have a stanza in your lilo.conf that shows your Windows OS.

LILO fails: Error messages and their interpretation
LILO mini HOWTO
Multiboot with LILO HOWTO
LILO, Linux Crash Rescue HOW-TO
Installing a bootloader

Try this in Linux:
dd if=/dev/hdb of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1
It'll copy lilo to the first disk's mbr (assuming the 2nd is Primary Slave). If it doesn't work, you can fix it with 'fixmbr' from XP cd or 'fdisk /mbr' from Win9x bootdisk.

Trust me, you don't want to do this...it'll wipe out the partition table on hda, if you need to do it this way use bs=446 instead.
As fancyripper suggested, you simply have to edit /etc/lilo.conf, change boot=/dev/hdb(or wherever your second drive is) to /dev/hda then run the lilo command, and it'll install itself to the MBR of hda, gracefully.

agreed with the above post-er

also, if you want to use a more user-friendly approach to adding windows xp, go into a terminal, type su (then root password) and do liloconf and follow the instructions (you want to start a new lilo.conf file)

if you want to edit /etc/lilo.conf manually, first tell us the result of su, then fdisk -l /dev/hda


edit: oh, and do backup your old lilo.conf file; go into terminal, do su, then cp /etc/lilo.conf /home/yourusername