Hi, Ugh, this sounds messy. Partitions are a pain! On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 10:19 AM, dmccunney <dennis.mccun...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I know the topic has been discussed here before, but I'm still > struggling with this problem.
Well, Grub 2 is fairly "new", or at least a lot of Linux distros only fairly recently started using it as default. I know it's supposed to be better somehow, but it always drags up complaints on bugs or hard-to-use or whatever. It certainly doesn't sound promising, but what can you do when distros force it on you? (Your repo may or may not also have older GRUB 1 as a fallback, lemme see ....) https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2#Uninstalling_GRUB_2 > I multi-boot Win2K Pro, Ubuntu Linux, Puppy Linux, and FreeDOS on an > old Fujitsu Lifebook. It has a 40GB IDE HD, with a 20GB primary > partition for 2K, and an extended partition with a 512MB swap areas > used by Ubuntu and Puppy, a bit over 8GB each for Ubuntu and Puppy, > and a 2GB slice for FreeDOS, formatted as FAT32. > > This used to work. On this Lenovo cpu, I'm triple-booting Win7 64-bit Home Premium, Lucid PuppyLinux 5.2.8, and FreeDOS 1.1 (ish). I would like to do something similar (but not exactly the same) for my Dell laptop. However, I have to be very careful as it's such a ball of wax. In particular, Grub 2 scares me. (Workarounds include VirtualBox, but without VT-X, it's painful. Live USB for Fedora worked okay but very quickly corrupted itself, so it's not reliable, IMHO.) EDIT: Actually, I (strangely) installed Puppy on native ext3 instead of a save file ("frugal"?). The save file method is probably easier to install. Though I once or twice tried booting successfully with Gujin (mini DOS version atop FreeDOS). At least Win2k presumably uses BOOT.INI, which is widely documented. Vista on up use BCD, which is supposedly a pain except with EasyBCD or similar. Yeah, Windows is still braindead about handling other OSes by default (probably to save themselves the support costs of phone calls from Joe User saying, "Windows doesn't boot!"). http://neosmart.net/EasyBCD/ > I had to do a clean reinstall of Win2K to resolve problems. This > replaced the MBR and broke Grub2. I was able to put Grub2 back and > recover the earlier multi-boot setup, but booting FreeDOS was broken. > Attempts to do so from the Grub menu return NOT FOUND KERNEL.SYS. Don't forget that you can always use DOSBox ("universe"??) or DOSEMU ("multiverse"??). I know neither is perfect, but neither is raw DOS either! They all have their own tradeoffs due to various bugs, limitations, etc. > My next step might be to copy the stuff I want to preserve over to the > Win2K slice form Win2K, then delete and recreate the FreeDOS partition > and do a clean install, but it's not clear that will solve the > problem. > > Suggestions? I don't know. On this Lenovo PC, I use BTTR's tiny BOOTMGR, whose MBR "chainloads" (?) to the boot managers for Win7 ("BCD"?) and PuppyLinux ("GRUB 1") on their own partitions. In short, you may have better luck using something like BOOTMGR, GRUB Legacy (1), or Gujin. I'm sorry I can't help more, but partitions (primary? extended?) are complicated. http://www.bttr-software.de/products/bootmgr/ http://web.archive.org/web/20110717103615/http://gujin.sourceforge.net/ ("old" docs from online) http://gujin.sourceforge.net/ http://wiki.osdev.org/Gujin http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Gujin "Gujin['s] main advantage over GRUB or LILO is its autodetection of the system at boot time, so that no configuration file exists at all." (Note that it also seems to boot hosted from various media and also seems to have a debian32.tar.gz version on SourceForge, among others. But I don't know if it'll work for you.) P.S. Don't forget Rufus: "Creating DOS Bootable USB drives the easy way" (via Win32) http://pbatard.github.com/rufus/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Write once. Port to many. Get the SDK and tools to simplify cross-platform app development. Create new or port existing apps to sell to consumers worldwide. Explore the Intel AppUpSM program developer opportunity. appdeveloper.intel.com/join http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-appdev _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
