Ok so another dual boot post...

I have two hard disks, one has Mandrake 10.0 installed (with GRUB on), the other has WinXP. Both OSes work just fine on their own. Not content with that I an trying to get both to live together happily. At the moment I have done the following: in mandrake I have done:

dd if=/dev/hda of=mnt/floppy/linux.bin bs=512 count=1

onto a DOS formatted floppy and copied this into C:\ of my XP install; then edited C:\boot.ini to have the line C:\linux.bin="Mandrake 10.0"

Then i did bootcfg /rebuild in recovery mode (after booting into XP with the XP install CD) - I am presuming that this rebuilds windows boot loader or whatever...

Now when I have my XP hard disk as Master and the Mandrake one as Slave and boot up the windows boot loader appears and presents me with the options to boot into WinXP or Mandrake 10.0. Booting into WinXP is all fine and dandy. Booting into Mandrake gets me as far as a limited part of the boot sequence (cant remember how far, but not very) before a kernel panic occurs and booting stops.

I think the problem is to do with how linux has named the partitions and these names are now changed. Or is it that there is a GRUB boot loader on the linux disk and this is screwing things up?

Any help is very much appreciated,

HedAche

My guess is that you change bootorder of the disks in the BIOS when working in 'single'. This means that grub will look for Linux on hda, which is now hdb!

Check your grub configuration file to find out; make any changes needed and make a new linux.bin file.

it was lilo not grub (doh!) - here is what /etc/lilo.conf looks like:

-----------------------------

boot=/dev/hda
map=/boot/map
default="linux"
keytable=/boot/uk.klt
prompt
nowarn
timeout=100
message=/boot/message
menu-scheme=wb:bw:wb:bw
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label="linux"
root=/dev/hda1
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append="devfs=mount acpi=ht resume=/dev/hda5 splash=silent"
vga=788
read-only
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label="linux-nonfb"
root=/dev/hda1
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append="devfs=mount acpi=ht resume=/dev/hda5"
read-only
image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.3-7mdk
label="263-7"
root=/dev/hda1
initrd=/boot/initrd-2.6.3-7mdk.img
append="devfs=mount acpi=ht resume=/dev/hda5 splash=silent"
read-only
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label="failsafe"
root=/dev/hda1
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append="failsafe acpi=ht resume=/dev/hda5 devfs=nomount"
read-only
other=/dev/fd0
label="floppy"
unsafe
other=/dev/hdb1
label="windows"
-----------------------------

If I understand you correctly you are saying that all I need to do is to change the names in lilo.conf to reflect the changes that occur when I have WinXP disk as master and linux as slave right? So now WinXP is hda and linux becomes hdb.

So, if I change the lilo.conf bit that says:

other=/dev/hdb1
label="windows"

to

other=/dev/hda1
label="windows"

and the bit that says:

image=/boot/vmlinuz
label="linux"
root=/dev/hda1
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append="devfs=mount acpi=ht resume=/dev/hda5 splash=silent"
vga=788
read-only

to say:

image=/boot/vmlinuz
label="linux"
root=/dev/hdb1
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append="devfs=mount acpi=ht resume=/dev/hda5 splash=silent"
vga=788
read-only

and make all the other relevant changes in the lilo.conf file, redo the boot.ini edit with the changed output from the dd command, then all is good right?

You also need to edit /etc/fstab accordingly.

BTW: you have acpi disabled.

Unless your system will NOT work with it enabled, you really should remove the "acpi=ht " entries.