Hi all, I have a long running Windows machine that I had previously attempted to make duel boot using the Windows boot loader mostly as an experiment. It's not my first dual boot. I've got 4 others that use grub and they all work fine. This machine, however, never did boot Linux and as it wasn't a high priority I just let it go and ran Windows on it as needed. However I now need to get it running and want to switch it over to grub as I doubt I'll be running windows on it very much in the future so I have a few questions.
The first problem I ran into on this machine was that immediately after finds my kernel and starts booting I get maybe 1 or 2 lines that are good but then the screen becomes unreadable. The text characters are highly garbled and there are columns of dots all over the screen. The card is an NVidia NV18 GeForce4 MX 400. Is there possibly a boot line option to get the system to write these characters cleanly? The second problem is that after the boot gets started I get a kernel panic. As background the disk layout of this machine, as viewed from within Linux booted from an install CD, looks roughly like this: /dev/hde1 * Blocks=1-3824 ID=7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/hde2 Blocks=3825-19457 ID=5 Extended /dev/hde5 Blocks=3825-3837 ID=83 Linux /dev/hde6 Blocks=3838-4020 ID=83 Linux /dev/hde7 Blocks=4021-7668 ID=83 Linux /dev/hde8 Blocks=7669-10218 ID=7 HPFS/NTFS The last NTSF partition is just data. The Linux partitions should be boot, swap and the system, in that order. I wanted to double check that I could load grub and stop using the Windows boot loader by using something like these commands: grub> root (hd0,6) grub> setup (hd0) Also, do I need to make /dev/hde5 bootable in fdisk? I think it's onot strictly required for grub but I might as well ask. The machine is going to run Gentoo for the foreseeable future and I'd prefer to use grub long term. However I don't want to completely mess up or get rid of the Windows install until I'm confident I've really finished with it for good. Thanks in advance, Mark -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
