Okay i had some troubles but i got windows xp installed on my sata drive, and i have slackware 10.2 installed on my 40 gig ide. i had it install LILO on the mbr. when i boot up though, it jumps straight to windows xp. how can i get it to load up LILO first so i can decide which operating system to boot up? Im stupid, and I told it to skip making a boot floppy (i couldn't find one). any ideas?

I'm pretty sure you can use the install CD to boot off of.

As for the disappearance of LILO, I have a hardware specific question. Which drive do you have in the primary IDE cable in the Master location/pin setting?

Here is what I think happened. You installed Slack on the second hard drive, but on that hard drive's MBR. When the computer boots, i believe it looks in the MBR on the first drive in line (I'm not sure, but I think the MBR is a small section of hard disk dedicated for this purpose). When Lilo was installed to the MBR, it may have been installed on the wrong drive which is why the boot process never sees it and skips right to windows.

...that or it never installed properly. I don't know, i'm going to have to read up on the MBR.

stupid? i would call it adventurous, but that's the spirit of slack

luckily we have Pat "the man" Volkerding looking after us who made sure you can still boot with cd1.

first what you need to know is what the slackware root partition is called (remember using fdisk or cfdisk when you made the partitions?)
if you don't, use cfdisk too look it up without making any changes too the partition table, it should be something like /dev/hda2 or something


now, as soon as you know your /dev/??? boot up with cd 1 , and do not hit Enter!!!

there's a sentence there like boot: bare.i root=/dev/fillin your root partition etc etc



that should get you going!

log in as root and look for /etc/lilo.conf and try to see if all looks fine (maybe write it down for this forum)

in the console type "lilo" and see what it does, any error messages?

I just noticed your other post and have a better idea of your hardware setup.

I'd check your boot sequence in the BIOS and explicitly set it to boot from the 40GB-IDE drive.

You're SATA drive is hooked onto a pci SATA controller right? Not directly to the motherboard ide channels... I had a setup like this once and I think I had it boot off the superblock of the hard drive on the IDE channel and not the one on the disc controller. Again, go into the bios, set the boot sequence explicitly and see if it finds lilo because lilo's physical location is on the MBR designated section of that drive.

i think you're right kriton 12,

you think there is a way to install lilo to the primary disc? otherwise i found this guide below that might be some help


Example 2: WinNT and Linux on separate hard drives

This part of the FAQ is based on a guide from Frankenlinux.

What if you want to have Windows NT and Linux on separate hard drives? Previously, you either had to give WinNT the primary hard drive, or swap out the hard drives to switch OSes. If you've been taking the swap approach, here's how to use LILO to make sense of it:

1. Jumper the Linux hard drive to be the master, and the NT drive to be the slave.
2. Hook them both up to the primary IDE channel.
3. Boot. You will get LILO and end up in Linux.
4. Open up /etc/lilo.conf, and add this to the end of the file:

other=/dev/hdb1
label=WindowsNT
table=/dev/hdb
map-drive = 0x80
to = 0x81
map-drive = 0x81
to = 0x80

Here's the line-by-line explanation:

other=/dev/hdb1: Tells LILO to boot an OS from the first partition on the primary slave drive.
label=WindowsNT: Tells LILO what this OS should be called.
table=/dev/hdb: Tells LILO to use the partition table from the primary slave drive.
map-drive = 0x80 / to = 0x81: Tells LILO to remap device 80 (primary master IDE drive) to 81 (primary slave).
map-drive = 0x81 / to = 0x80: Same as above, but in reverse.

5. Save the file.
6. /sbin/lilo -L

Reboot, and Windows will be a boot option. If you choose it, LILO will trick it into thinking it is on the Primary Master drive, when in fact it is on the Primary Slave.

Primary disc is kind of relative (not in the physical location sense, obvioulsy it's on the first IDE channel ribbon, on the first cable section). Which is why I say change the boot sequence in the bios.

When a computer boots control starts in the bios. It hands control off to the designated device in the boot sequence. In his case, the Primary devices are both cd/dvd rom drives. His master device on the secondary ide cable is his 40gig hard drive. The windows drive is on a disk controller (usually a pci card with extra ATA connectors on it) and probably shows up as /dev/hde1 (first partition on the 5th device). I think his bios is currently set to boot from the 5th device. Does this make sense? I don't want to goof up the explanation, but I think that's what is happening. It's probably easier to change the boot sequence than opening the case and swapping the hardware.

What we really need to see Dachy is a better explanation of your hardware setup and how the bios boot sequence goes.

okay well i got it figured out as far as booting with lilo showing up. kriton you were correct, the cable does select my ide channel first, and i had forgot that in my harddrive "boot sequence" it picks that over the sata drive, this has been fixed.

my problem now is that when i boot up, i choose windows, and it just gets stuck at "Loading Windows...."

my thoughts are that when i "mounted" the windows xp partition during the install of slackware, it caused lilo to configure itself to look for it in /sataxp, instead of /dev/hdc where it really is i suppose? well thansk in advanced everyone, you've been most helpful!

i've tried using setup to do an expert install of LILO. i pointed it to /dev/sda1 which is my sata hard drive that has windows xp installed on it. everything looked to be correct and fine, but it still just freezes at "Loading Windows". it does however respond to "ctrl+alt+backspace". this is really frustrating because when i want to switch from xp to linux or vice versa I have to go into the bios each time and tell it which hard drive to boot first. any ideas guys?

Dachy, on the SATA hard drive, am I correct in assuming you are plugged into some type of hard disk controller (which is probably plugged into a pci card slot) and not on a scsi connector?

If this is so (and even if it's not), I'd suggest changing your lilo configuration to look for windows at /dev/hde1 (assuming windows is on the first primary partition, if you have other logical partitions on that drive they'd start at hde5 etc.)

So, the quick steps:
Edit the file /etc/lilo.conf
Under the windows entry change it so it points to /dev/hde1
execute the lilo command as root
reboot.

If that doesn't work, post some more info about where you bios "sees" the xp hard drive. From there it might be able to tell lilo where it is, but try the above first, I think it'll fix your problem.

im not sure what you mean about a hard disk controller, it's plugged into the motherboard (asus a8v deluxe). when i installed slackware by itself on my sata a year ago, it was seen as /dev/sda, and when slackware automatically mounted my windows partition for me during the install it saw it as /dev/sda. i am absolutely positive that the sata hard drive is seen as /dev/sda from before.

so here's what my hardware configuration is like: primary ide is the first hd to boot up, it has slackware installed and lilo is installed on the mbr of that hard drive. slackware is located on /dev/hdc2. the second hard drive is my sata hard drive with windows xp installed on it (which i had installed before i installed slackware). Windows xp is located on /dev/sda1. in my lilo configuration everything looks to be pointing correctly to the right partitions. when i boot up though, if i choose windows it will say: "Loading Windows" and do nothing at all.

some of my ideas to fix this were going into the bios, setting my sata/windows xp hard drive to be the boot device and installed LILO on the mbr on it if possible. also, i was thinking about installing it on the root partition of the IDE drive, although i never did this before....

I have the exact same configuration. My IDE drive is the first boot drive with lilo and windows is no my sata drive. Now, I was able to get grub to work with his configuration when I had suse installed by using the map command to fake the system into thinking the sata drive is the boot drive when the windows item was chosen from the menu. Unfortunately, lilo won't work for me and VectorLinux which I am using now does not come with grub. I have discovered that you need to use map-drive <some number> to map-drive <some number> to remap in lilo, but I am unsure of the bios number of a sata drive. The first ide bios number starts at 0x80, but I don't know about a sata. In grub all you do is map /dev/sda1 rather than a bios hexidecimal number.

If anyone figures this out or knows where I can download grub without using the cvs system which I am not familiar with, I would appreciate it.

Thanks,

My first guess is you need to edit the Windows boot.ini file. See if this helps:

Multibooting Tips

I usually "fix" that by adding boot-as=0x80 line to Windows part of lilo.conf, here's mine:
If you want more info about what that command means, try: man lilo.conf

make sure the BIOS are booting harddrive IDE0 first and not scsi if it is set it to hard drive IDE0 first and save setting reboot and wala. . if that fails you have to reinstall lilo on hda MBR because when you loaded XP it's scripts did a fdisk MBR like all windows do when installing . your fdisk mbr took out lilo on the MBR if lilo is on the the first block of the root hda1 then it will never get ran BIOS looks at the first sector fist unless told not to. so lilo is never being loaded. take your 10.2 install disk boot it up when you get to the root promt type setup then we will make a swap taget then we will click on are hard drive do not format now the installer has made a /tmp/slackware/etc file you can cancel the install quit your install setup you will be back at the root promt type liloconfig. do an expert lilo will read the /tmp/slackware/etc/fstab file and know where the hda mbr is. ok now install it to the hda use the MBR. if it is a hda. make sure you have the bios set to none plug n play non windows O/S it will look for IDE devices first because we told bios to boot that way RIGHT.so it looks to me the sda is loading first and that is a easy BIOS fix with OUT REINSTALLING LILO>.
oh yeah while you are installing lilo make a boot floppy to. IN BIOS you must select which drive to load first.ide0 ide1 etc or flopp then cdrom then ide0 not scsi .when booting windows put back to plug-n-play or windows os so it will load the corect irq addresses

Hi,

Why do you continue to reply to old threads? The post date is almost two years old.

Plus! Do you know what a 'paragraph' is?