Linux + Windows
 

I have Red Hat linux 7.1 installed on my system for quite a while, and I want to install Windows Millenium in order to play games that I cannot seem to get to work with Wine: StarCraft, WarCraft II, Diablo II in particular. here is the process I used to go about this:

- use Disk Druid on the RH install cd to make the /boot, /, and swap partitions for the linux part of the disk, leaving 10 GB free for...
- the windows partition, which I made using dos's fdisk.
- I went back to Disk Druid to check that all my partitions were in order (becuase of course dos cannot see ext2 partitions), and they were, except for the mount points which were erase for some reason. oh well.
- go back to windows cd and install it. it works as well as windows can, really trying its best.
- install RH linux. I must redefine the mount points... I guess those dont get written to the partition table.
- in the installation, after the formatting of the drive (which for some reason I must go through again, even after I only defined mount points and nothing else) I get the following error:

An error occured while installing the bootloader:
Warning: device 0x0303 exceeds 1024 cylinder limit.

- it tells me that I must make a boot disk or I will not be able to boot into linux... but I havent gotten my floppy drive working yet , and since I'm too lazy to do it now, I disregaurd the error and try to load linux anyway. it works
- BUT windows will not work. When attempting to boot into Windows, I get the following error:

Loading windows
Error 0x40

Linux works; Windows doesnt.

has anyone gotten RH + WinME to work successfully? I'm really tired of having a computer that I may have to reformat at any time!

the 1024 error means you're trying to set up the bootloader to access the /boot partition loacted after the 1024th cylinder, which is not allowed on rh < 7.2. only md8+ or rh72 can currently do that i think. proabbly suse7.3 too.

your primary partition needs to be less that 8.4gb in order to install easily. if you insisit on keeping 10gb in one lump, then you'll need a newer distro, or find a decent alternative boot loader. you could also install without lilo, and then upgrade to lilo 21.7 or greater once you're goign.

but I have had RH linux alone on the disk for quite a while, with just /boot, /, and swap partitions, where the / partition was about 28 gb. why didnt it give me an error then?

cos /boot always goes before / on the hard drive

28gigs at / ?
...Not exactly a wise setup.

but I *always* put /boot before /... even on my unseccessful win + lin installs

why is it unwise to have a big / dir?

0x40 Seek failure. This might be a media problem. Try booting again. This is what the error message means.

What some people do when they have large hard drives, is to create a small partition at the begining of the hard drive and designate it as /boot. Then they create a partition for windows. Next, they create partitions for linux. This arrangement is supposed to eliminate the 1024 cylinder problem for older versions of lilo. You might want to check the windows entry in /etc/lilo.conf to make sure it's correct. It usually looks something like this:

other=/dev/hdxy
label=windows
table=/dev/hdx

yeah.... that's what I did...

no my lilo.conf does not look like that. it looks like this:

boot=/dev/hda
map=/boot/map
install=/boot/boot.b
prompt
timeout=50
message=/boot/message
linear
default=linux

image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.2-2
label=linux
read-only
root=/dev/hda6

other=/dev/hda3
optional
label=windows

my lilo version is 21.4-4, im about to go look for a newer version

once you get a newer versino, you should replace 'linear' with 'lba32'