dual boot with win 2k
 

Hi all

If there's a good thread addressing this issue already, could you point me toward it?

I use a win 2k system and bought a slave drive to load a red hat 7.1 distribution onto. Used partition magic to set the second drive up as:

/boot 32 MB
swap 2 GB
/ 40 GB

With the other 50 or so GB set up as NTFS storage space. Installed RH with no problem, using lilo on /boot. Created a boot disk.

But linux will not load. It loads 2 files from floppy and then fails, giving an error which says to remove the disk, press any key to continue. So...I loaded linux from the install cd in 'rescue' mode, copied to the boot sector on hdb to a floppy, copied that to C:\, and edited boot.ini to point there as option 2. This doesn't work either, only now i get a message saying that the NT Kernel is corrupt when i try to load linux!

Windows still starts just fine though.

One other thing - /boot is hdb6. Does the number 6 instead of 1 mean that my /boot is outside the first sector of the new drive?

Thanks,

Tim.

Hello there

just a quick tips about disk and partitions under linux:

under linux you can know where is your hard drive is connected

primary master = /dev/hdax
primary slave = /dev/hdbx
secondary master = /dev/hdcx
secondary slave = /dev/hddx

the x on the previews exemple (/dev/hdax) is the number of the partition

ie: /dev/hda1 is the first, primary partition of your HD connected on primary master.

Note: if you start using linux i would recommend you a newer distribution like fedora core4 (free version of red hat), because they made a lot of improvement and the multy boot will be installed automaticly.

angel115s' suggestion of getting something newer is a very good one - it should reduce the problems that you may experience no end.

I don't think (from memory) that it matters overly, where the /boot partition is (thats if you actually use a proper /boot partition rather than the usual /boot directory that would, I think, be default for redhat/fedora). As long as the /etc/fstab knows where to look for it. You should (as I understand it) only need to put the bootloader on the first section of the main MBR on the first hard drive, so that it can know where the linux OS is installed, and can also see the windows version and offer it as a bootable option - It's possible that if you put the bootloader on the second hdd, you'd either have to have a boot floppy or change the boot order in your BIOS to get into linux, because all the system would see is the windows bootloader (yes you can config that to start linux as well, but I understand it's a bit tricky).

So by putting it on the first part of the first hdd, it should overwrite the windows bootloader, and offer you a proper "what OS do you want" type option of either the windows or the linux.

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll check out Fedora.

Re: dual boot with win 2k
 

Probably, I'm just too lazy to search for it :D.

This doesn't necessarily have to work ;) since it depends from where you made LILO write its boot-code -- maybe to boot? I don't know but you will, so if it is /boot do a This is not identical to the boot sector of /dev/hdb. At least your idea was sound, in my box it works fine.

Certainly. In this case you didn't do what you told us in your original post ;). /hdb6 is the second logical partition in your extended partition of hdb. If you want to check your layout use fdisk or chkdsk(?)...