Hi.

I'm at a loss. I have a dual boot system, with Linux installed on a seperate hard drive. My Windows XP drive is SCSI, and the Fedora drive is IDE. Initially I installed the system as win xp / Red Hat 9. It was working well..... but I couldn't leave it alone. So anyhow, I upgraded to Fedora Core 1. The installation went fine, and it works well.

So here's the problem. I'd been using a boot disk to boot to Red Hat, since grub was installed on the ide drive, and simply did not work to load XP. However, during the Fedora upgrade, when it came time to make a boot disk, the installer told me that my install image was too large to create a boot disk???? (WTF?)

I did a clean install on another box recently with far more packages installed, and THAT system made a boot disk just fine, thank you.

So right now the only way i can switch between OS's is to enter the BIOS and change the boot sequence. This works, but it's horribly annoying.

So, is there any way to make a "smaller" boot disk, or perhaps use GRUB or LILO on a floppy or something? I'm not willing to mess with the windows drive. ....

Help......


Thanks...

Jonathan

Install GRUB/LILO to the MBR, this will eliminate having to go through the bios.

Also, it will eliminate using a floppy.
And, it will boot any OS's installed on any local drives.
Including windows.

well...
yes, but I'm a little nervous about doing this. It's installed in the MBR on the IDE drive, and when the bios is set to boot to ide, the "dos" option does not boot windows on the scsi drive, it just prints a few lines and hangs. So the thing is I really don't want to mess with the windows drive because it is my main pc and I can't afford to have it go down. I have a lot of pc's I'm willing to mes around with constantly, but this one is not only used by me and I have to be careful with it.

Besides, the other folks using the box wouldn't be comfortable choosing which OS to boot to. (I know, it's simple, but it's just not going to go over well)

So what I really need is a floppy solution......


But thanks!

You simply cannot boot from a floppy if your bzImage is greater than 1.44 MB.
Try taking unneccessary stuff out of the kernel, or compile more stuff as modules, and recompile. That is the only way I know of.
Someone else here may have a better solution.

I don't see why GRUB is not booting Win/DOS from your SCSI drive unless you don't have mixed mode on in the bios.

Thank you.

I really do appreciate your help. I guess I don't understand why there isn't some way to create a floppy that will simply point to the working boot record on the ide drive for Fedora. I've been reading the GRUB manual, and there are references to making a GRUB floppy, but so far it's not working. If I could get it to boot the IDE drive I'd be all set.

It's odd really, I followed the instructions, which were to use the following commands from the cd /usr/share/grub/i386-redhat directory: ( they appeared to work as advertised in the online manual)

dd if=stage1 of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 count=1

returns:

1+0 records in
1+0 records out

dd if=stage2 of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 seek=1

returns:

203+1 records in
203+1 records out

(though the manual does differ slightly in that it states that the return on the stage2 command will be 153+1 records in and out, but I imagine this is system specific ?? )

In any event, when attempting to boot from this floppy, A GRUB message comes up, but it fails. (I don't remember exactly what the error was but I can find out)

I feel like I may be on the right track, but so far the manual only gives this procedure. I find it confusing that no configuration is required on the floppy, but I've been thinking that perhaps these commands are exporting the grub file

also, when attempting to boot windows from the GRUB on the ide Hard drive, I get a message "error parsing number"

Well, I've done it.

A little more time with the manual and a few more lost hairs, but it works.

I created a GRUB boot disk as I noted above. The second time seemed to work properly, and the disk no brings me to a grub> prompt.

I copied down the commands from my grub.conf file that load Fedora:

root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.22-1.2115.nptl ro root=LABEL=/
initrd /initrd-2.4.22-1.2115.nptl.img

after entering these one at a time from the GRUB prompt, I type "boot" and voila!

So... now I can set the BIOS to boot to SCSI, and use the floppy to boot in to Fedora. It's a lot of typing, but it's a resounding success nonetheless. My next mission will be to figure out if there is a way to use a grub.conf file (or something like it) on the floppy, to automate the process.

Does anyone know if this is possible?

ouch.



Okay so Today I went to boot using the exact syntax above.... which worked yesterday, and suddenly I had a kernel panic on my hands.

The system still boots okay from the ide drive-installed GRUB.....


I did do some RHN updates, so maybe I need to remake the disk?????


Any thoughts?

Jonathan