To all who wrote with suggestions, thank you for your efforts but it looks
like I need to clear up a few point which have masked the real problem.
The two OSes are on different disks.
I can't boot from the floppy because I get corrupted data and just end up
getting codes printed on the screen. Either the floppy drive is broken or
the BIOS is corrupting the data.
If I switch the jumpers (ie master/slave) I can boot win95 normally or
linux normally. Both disks are fine and the MBR of each disk can be used.
The win95 disk has not been altered AT ALL.
The Ontrack is on my Linux disk which has LILO and which is used as the
master disk. LILO then boots either Linux /dev/hda or Win95 /dev/hdb (well
that's the plan).
Ontrack is run on a disk before you can even format it, it claims the MBR
and some extra area and then creates a new fake MBR area after the Ontrack
code. So when you boot the disk Ontrack is executed and then control is
directed to the fake MBR. Thus LILO actually ends up writing to the fake MBR
area since its write requests are redirected by Ontrack. Hence the two can
coexist happily.
The problem seems to be that the Ontrack is intercepting HD requests for
BOTH disks and thus linearising the normal EIDE disk as well (which would
make the disk mapping become unusable). I need to find a way to either
remove Ontrack from my Linux disk (or at least disable it) or make Ontrack
affect only one of the disks.
I have Ontrack because the disk was originally used on a 486 with small
IDE BIOS. I am now attempting to use it with a new machine with a BIOS which
handles large (>528 MB) IDE drives.
I cannot mount any of the other hard disks in the system from linux. I
figure this is a symptom of the same problem, since it would linearise any
attempts to read/write the other disks.
It seems my only course of action is to buy a new floppy drive (thankfully
these are pretty cheap) and boot from that (which would prevent Ontrack from
being booted). However the problem then is that I can't mount the Ontrack
disk from a kernel on the floppy because Ontrack needs to be running before
the filesystem can be mapped properly. I need a way to simply choose which
HD to use as the Master disk since both have MBR which are bootable.
I am thinking of puting LILO in the MBR of a floppy and then redirecting
to a different OSs. Eg
other=/dev/hda
label=linux
table=/dev/hda1
#
other=/dev/hdb
label=win95
table=/dev/hdb1
Cheers
Rich
