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Got this problem: I had Win NT installed on my small 1,6GB harddrive. I decided to add 120GB drive with Mandrake. I changed 1,6GB to secondary master and 120GB to primary master.
Everything was fine, i installed Mandrake, created partitions 7GB for Linux, 1GB for swap and 102GB for data formatted as FAT32.
Then i changed LILO to let boot NT4 from the other drive (dev/hdb1)
And........ NT failed to boot up and i get only blank screen with cursor "_"
When i change the drive back primary master, NT boots up normally.
Change the harddisks, the way you want them to be. Boot from your NT bootdisk. and run:
fixmbr (or so it is in XP) This will erase mbr.
Then reboot
Hope to get into NT. If this works, boot from your linux cd. install LILO. This should fix the problem. If NT doesn't boot, well, nothing I can help you with then. Sorry.
If I remember correctly, the NT4 System partition must be on the first (Primary Master in your case) hard drive. You can store "\WINNT" on another partition or drive, but the C:\ has to be just that, C:\ (for the boot.ini, ntdetect, and ntldr files)
If I may make the following suggestions;
1) Leave your NT drive as the Primary Master (hey, you know it works right?) and plug your 120GB in as a Secondary Master and reinstall Mandrake on the second drive. Linux dosn't have any issues booting from a second hard drive.
OR
2) While you still have your Mandrake on the Primary Master, edit your /etc/lilo.conf. Leave your "boot = /dev/hda" entry unchanged and be sure your entry for NT4 is configured to boot from the first drive (remember to run /sbin/lilo afterwards). Edit your /etc/fstab file so the mountpoints refer to /dev/hdc (or /dev/hdb, I don't remember which) instead of /dev/hda. Shutdown your system and plug drives in the new configuration you want. Then restart your machine.
Personally, I would take suggestion #1 as it would be the easier of the two to implement.
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