boot partitions

newlinuxman · 09-15-2001, 08:08 PM

Could somebody please tell me whether I can boot Red HAt 7.1 from a hard drive.. BUT if it is installed on the primary slave?????
Does Red Hat have to be installed in the primary master??

My primary master has windows on it.

Right now I physically unplug the power to my primary master with windows on it. I then use a floppy and boot into Red HAt 7.1 from the floppy.

Is there an easier way??

Thank you in advance

MAtt

kris.kj.jacobs · 09-16-2001, 07:11 AM

You cannot boot an operating system from a slave disk. However, there are a number of possibilities:

1/ Use loadlin. This is a DOS based program to load a linux kernel from a booted DOS (and possibly also Windows) machine.

2/ Configure the second harddisk as secondary master and use lilo (or another boot manager) on the MBR of your first harddisk.

3/ Create a small /boot partition at the beginning of your first HDD (30M is sufficient). For this solution you would also need lilo.

acid_kewpie · 09-16-2001, 09:20 AM

i'm pretty sure you can use lilo fine, just set the boot=/dev/hda line in the lilo.conf file

newlinuxman · 09-16-2001, 10:10 AM

I don't understand how it would be possible to set boot=/dev/hda when that disk is powered down.

Therefore when I start the computer the BIOS only sees my primary slave.

I appreciate everyone's input.

Will continue to experiment.

Thank you.

newlinuxman · 09-16-2001, 11:21 AM

Thank you all for your input. I finally managed to do it. I took a little different approach. I found a site called www.littlewhitedog.com

I stuck the linux.bin file in my windows root and added c:\linux.bin to my boot.ini in windows