OK, here is a question hopefully someone can help answer. I had Red Hat 8.0 working perfectly on my system. I am on a compaq Armada m700 and everything was great. I decided to dual boot to Win2k and had previously left a partition blank just for this purpose. So I commenced to installing Win2k on the blank partition. Now my computer is currently paritioned like this..

Paritition 1 Linux Red Hat 8.0
Partition 2 Win2k
Partition 3 Master boot record

Sounds ok.. Win2k works perfectly as I am using it right now.. However the win2k destroyed the information on the Master Boot Record Partition (which I now know that happens a lot).. I don't have a floppy available on this laptop nor do I have a CD burner.. I do have the installation disks for both Red Hat and for Win2k available.. And heck I have an install disk for XP if I needed it for something.. Does anyone know how I can make this dual boot to both with what I have available?? I tried using the Red Hat to install Grub or Lilo again, but it wouldn't let me do it if I wasn't installing more software which I dont' need..

Jason Thomas

your Master Boot Record is not a partition, just a lil old area at the start of the drive to tell the thing where to go to find an os...

so you don't have lilo installed at all? if you run "lilo" you get an error right? lilo shouldn't have any dependencies to install. or do you mean you are trying to reinstall redhat over the top of it? that's notthe way to go about it really. just use teh redhat disk to launch into rescue mode (should be an option at the boot screen) and then you will have access to the linux files on the system. all you should need to do is then run lilo, the executable itself should be at /mnt/sysimage/bin/lilo in rescue mode and make it use the proper file /mnt/sysimage/etc/lilo.conf, after making any changes to it, like making sure that boot=hda (i.e. to use the MBR itself, and also that you have the relevant entries for both linux and windows. you might find a few errors in the lilo.conf file due to the fact that your normal / partition is temporarily /mnt/sysimage, so a line that says "image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.20" won't work. so either copy the file to that location (which is actaully a virtual file system held in ram) or edit the lilo.conf file temporarily to point to /mnt/sysimage/boot/vmlinuz.

OK that sounds cool.. Only I tried using rescue mode.. when I did that it went into a graphical situation where it tried to install or upgrade Red Hat again.. Now from that I asked it to resintall lilo and it wouldn't do it unless I was adding software to red hat.. does that make any sense?

JT

every time that i've ever did the ol dual boot thing i always had win2k on first. then after it was installed, i installed RH to the other partition. i don't know if u feel like re-doing everything, but i know that it works fine...i thought you always had to have ur winblows installed first if u were going to dualboot, but i def. could be wrong.....oh, and make sure ur winblows is runnin on fat32, cause i'm not sure if RH can recognize ntfs....aight..hope this helps u a little...maybe it won't..hehe...later

that won't be rescue mode then, you should be able to type in "linux rescue" and it should attempt to directly load the existing installation. unless they've radically chagned the installer.

I apologize for the double post.. I wasn't aware that it was illegal here.. When I first reposted after the first fix didn't work I didn't get an answer for quite a while so I thought it was being ignored and that I should try another section of the forum.. I'm sorry...

Still need help?

No i still haven't gotten it figured out yet.. With no floppy drive it makes this difficult.. Any ideas?

JT

Can you boot your Red Hat install CD; type 'linux rescue' at the prompt; continue on to choose your Linux partition and allow the rescue system to mount your Linux partition on /mnt/sysimage.
You may want to confirm your partition setup. As acid_kewpie says, your MBR is not on the 3rd partition. Either you have an extra partition you have created or things are not where you think.
After choosing the correct disk partition for your Linux install, type 'chroot /mnt/sysimage' (as the on screen display mentions). You can then enter commands as if you were running your system.
If you need to confirm your partition setup, type 'fdisk /dev/hda'. Use the 'p' option to print the partition table to the screen, and the 'q' option to quit.
If you had Lilo running previously, you just need to type '/sbin/lilo'. If you had Grub, I will not be any help. You will probably need to add your Win2K to Lilo after reboot.
Good Luck.

GRUB or LILO?

I recommend grub. If you have it let me know...I can't help much w/lilo.

OK.. When I got into the linux recovery mode again.. I typed /sbin/grub and grub came up... Now I have never seen grub before so I have no clue what it is supposed to look like.. What i got was purely non graphical.. Actually it was just a dos prompt grub\ And that was it.. I have no clue how to use it now to fix it.. Luckily I have been able to toggle back to win2k using the win2k CD to disable the linux partition.. Now if I can just figure out how to use grub in non graphical mode I will be ok.. Can you help there?

JT

Do you have a boot disk?
If so, get back to redHat and do:
(as su)
grub-install /dev/hda

You only have one HD, right?

I only have one hard drive but three partitions.. Should that make a difference??

JT

that command puts grub on the mbr. Then have a look at the link in my sig for my grub.conf file. There's a section that allows booting to Windows NTFS.

title Windows NTFS
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
chainloader +1