I have read through the forums and have tried many other sites
and want to post my problem with having dual-boot. I have not come
across my exact situation and maybe someone can help.

I have a 36Gb SCSI HD with Wiin98 on it. I created only an 18Gb partition
with fdisk to put Win98 on it. I figured I'd get that done and then
install RedHar 7.2

This didn't go as planned. I tried installing and using GRUB, but
when trying to boot the DOs/Win98 partition I get the message that
it is not a boot disk. I have loaded into the MBR.

The confusing part is that I read some people saying DO NOT put
GRUB into MBR, but put into boot sector (was that what it was called?).
I read lots of conflicting info.

I will tell you I have at my disposal Partition Magic 7.0 I tried
doing what IT says and create ext2 partition and sawp partition in
the free space and make it a LOGICAL partition instead of a primary.
Linus loaded fine, but Win98 boots and I don't even get the GRUB
screen.

My simple (well, not so simple) question is what should I do to get
this working, with all the tools at my disposal. Should I use Partition
Magic? Should I use GRUB or LILO? Should I put it in MBR or boot sector?
Should I install linux and then Win98 or vice versa? Should I use
partition magic to mave my Win98 partition a little to the right and
place a /boot linux partition in the first 1024 cylinders?

More info: Brand spanking new Asus P4T motherboard with Award BIOS,
so I am very up to date with the BIOS. I am a techie, and have done
Win98 and Linux before, but that was when the HD was a mere 18GB and I
has a small 6Gb linux partition. I read that you can't go beyond 8Gb
or something, but let's just leave that alone.

Any help would be appreciated. I know I am really close here.

Myself personally at the moment, am booting Linux from a floppy disk, and windowsXP straight through off the MBR.

I used partition magic 7 to make the partition and had no problem. My friend tried and screwed up. What a pain that was to fix.

I find LILO a pain in the butt (that's why I have the boot disk). But I am just using this at home so it's no real fuss for me to reboot, annoying but not any real drama. I have no experience with GRUB. sorry.

I would probably use PM7 but I would be extremely careful and make sure that it does what you exactly want or it can be very messy. Also you probably already did, but a friendly reminder defrag your hard drive with the WINDOWS disk defragmenter. The Norton one isn't a good choice by far. Norton was one of my friends problems.

I have never ever had trouble with having linux load from LILO nor windows (Win98, WinNT4, WinXP) none of them.

I don't really know whether Ive helped or not, but it really comes down to your preference and making it work.


kwigibo

I have had nothing but trouble with Partition M., So when I installed I wiped everything clean and fdisk'd it all with dos & linux's utilities respectively. Installing Windows first should always be the best idea, then linux. I've never had a problem using LILO, Grub on the other hand I can't stand. I'd use lilo and put it in the MBR still. The 1024 boundary is no longer a problem and you can make sure by saying force lba32 when you are installing LILO in RedHat. After all that, I can't see any reason that LILO would not boot you into Win98 or RedHat. That's what i'd do and do do. Put Win on your 18G or whatever space at the beginning and then make a /<root> and /swap partition, maybe a /usr if you wanna split it up and call er good. Don't worry where on the drive things go. If you need to, the above response about booting from a floppy isn't all that bad of an idea either.

Hey thanks Taz.

I will try this option tonight. The only thing is that I can't use the floppy option. When the install asks to create a floppy disk, it fails. It never even accesses the darn thing to write anything to it. It know it works, 'cause I had to boot from a win98 floppy after I wiped out my partitions before.

Do you suggest using the linux fdisk, or can I use disk druid, or will that cause a problem, as I have read?

And which partition should be the active partition (win98 or linus) or does it not matter?

Thanks.

Too bad about the floppy, i'm not sure why it wouldn't work, but as far as the other questions; Disk Druid should really work just fine. I've never heard of problems with it myself anyhow, and it's worked for me, especially since fdisk is a pain. Which one is default is user preference, just depends on which you'd like to be default, no system ramifications.

Try running lilo as root when you are in linux.

probably it will show a error message ...Then try deleteing "linear" and put "lba32" instead in the /etc/lilo.conf file

Now there should not me any message

Try booting up the system now

Hope this works .
Atleast it worked for me

I am really grateful to all. I tried thew suggestions and I have the smae problem. Message is that it is a non-system disk. I looked at lilo.conf and it has /dev/sdb1 as the disk for DOS, which is disk number 2. I changed it to /dev/sda1 and it made no difference.

I already had lba32 instead of liner in there. Made no difference.

I am thinking my problem is that my disk is so huge - it's 36 Gb, with 18 for Win98. I still read that there is some 8 Gb limit (the 1024 cylinder limit), but it is conflicting info.

The last thing I did was use partition magic to shift my DOS partition over 47 Mb, so that the next time I try to install linux, the /bott will be in those first 1024 cylinders, but I don't see how this will make the difference either, as LILO and GRUB both had no problem getting into linux, but DOS was the problem.

I can't find any info on Redhat 7.2 with Win98 already installed, and a disk drive this large.

Luckily, I have ghosted my C: drive so in case of loss of partition, I can still restore my Win98.

any more feedback is welcome.

I am currently dual booting windows 2000 and linux using partition magic and boot magic and it works fine. I am a total linux newbie but I'll try and help.

Here's my setup:

My master HD is, in linux, hda. Ok, I have split my drive into 2 windows partitions, one for windows 2000 and one for data (i.e., drive C and drive D). In linux, this creates hda1 and hda2. (I realize you have a scsi drive, so it may be sda1 and sda2 for you.)

I then used partitionmagic to split my D drive in half, in order to create room for linux. This is a logical parition too -- if I formatted it in fat32 it would be drive E.

Ok, in my new linux partition, using partition magic, I created 3 mini partitions for linux -- one for /boot, one for /swap, and one for /root. In linux, this created hda4, hda5, and hda6. (I think hda3 went to the logical drive). Anyway, I could tell what these partitions were when I installed linux -- i.e, during Mandrake install, it found these partitions and during Gentoo install, I used fdisk and it also found these partitions (i'm trying various distributions).

Ok, so I installed linux. When it came time for me to install the bootloader, (i.e. LILO), I installed it in to boot sector, NOT the Master Boot Record of the entire hard drive. That means, I installed LILO at hda4, which is where my /boot is.

I then rebooted into Windows, used Boot Magic to create an entry for Linux and pointed it to the same /boot partition and voila -- works just fine.

Couple more points:

I think the 1024 cylinder limit is no longer a problem for newer kernels. I'll defer to the kernel experts, but that's what I've read somewhere.

If you ever accidentally wipe your MBR, you can use a Win 98 boot disk to fdisk /mbr to get it back.

If you use GRUB instead of LILO, then you have to pay attention to how GRUB designates drives and partitions. It is not the same as LILO. It uses hd0 to refer to hda, and partitions start at 0, not 1, so hda6 would be equal to (hd0,5).

I ran dual boot that way for quite awhile, it sounds like having such large partitions is making life hard for you. Always install win98 first, since it tends to overwrite your MBR. (M$ denies that people would use more than one os I suppose

A trick I like to do is make your first partition a super small, say 50MB, /boot and make it bootable. Then place your windows parition, followed by your linux parition(s). I've used it for awhile, and with such large drives, there isn't much that works better. Especially if you decide to use more than one linux distrib.

Anthony

The problem is redhat still ship an outdated version of lilo, the one that comes with RH7.2 is v21.4 and you need a version greater than 21.7 to get around the 1024cyl problem.I have no idea why RH don't ship an updated lilo but I suspect someone is playing politics and trying to promote grub over lilo. Download and install the latest lilo and you should be fine.

Problem solved.

Hey thanks everyone. My solution was that I created a 60 Mb partition at the beginning of disk via Partition Magic. This is where I put /boot, then the rest came after Win98 partition. I am not sure this was necessary as the problem was that /etc/lilo.conf had /sdb1 as the device for DOS to load, and that is my second disk. It completely ignored /sda1. I edited this file before, but did not know I have to actually run lilo at the command prompt for it to integrate this into the boot sector. This then worked fine. I think I am going to make ghost backup of complete drive (not just win98) and then try to install once again, but without having the partitions split like that (just becuase I am a nitpicker). If it doesn't work, I can always ghost back to a working drive.

I may even try GRUB. It too had the problem where it used /sdb1 instead of /sda1. Of course, I have to figure out how to get the grub config file into the boot sector.

Great. Nothing Better than knowing you have accomplished something. Especially pain in the butt problems like this one seemed to be.


kwigibo