On Sat May 16 1998, Rob Kobiske wrote:
> I know this might not sound good but i would like to dula boot to have Red
> Hat Linux on one have of my hard drive and Microsoft Windows NT on the
> other. I know it has to do something with lilo but can somebody give my
> some advice on how to do it or where i could get a how to that would
> explain it?
Easy. It has everything to do with lilo.
lilo is simply a program that writes boot sectors to bootable drives (ie,
hard drives and floppy disks).
The file /etc/lilo.conf instructs lilo what to do.
If you want to write a boot sector to your hard drive (/dev/hda) then put
this into lilo.conf and run it...
boot=/dev/hda
If you want one to a floppy disk to boot from, then use this instead (and
run lilo with a floppy in the drive):
boot=/dev/fd0
So far, so good.
I'm not telling you how to duel-boot yet (we'll get there soon), because at
this point it is probably a very good thing to create a floppy disk to boot
from in case the winNT install program overwrites it. It didn't happen in
my case - lilo was left alone - but it just _might_ happen.
Ok, now you need to tell lilo that you want to boot other things besides
linux.
This is what I have in lilo.conf to boot a 2.0.33 kernel that I've built
for myself:
image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.0.33
label=linux
root=/dev/hdb1
read-only
vga=8
append="ether=9,0xd400,eth0 ether=10,0xd000,eth1 aha1542=0x330,12"
The append statements are needed because I have more than one ethernet card
in my machine, as well as a scsi card.
However, I have a RedHat 5.0 system, and I've kept the original kernel so
that I can optionally boot that if I like:
image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.0.32
optional
label=redhat
root=/dev/hdb1
read-only
vga=ask
append="ether=9,0xd400,eth0 ether=10,0xd000,eth1 aha1542=0x330,12"
So now when I run lilo, it writes a boot sector that allows me to boot with
one of two kernel images. Cool, no? Note the `label=' and `optional'
parameters that I've used here.
Above these lines (just after the "boot=" statement), I have this:
default=linux
This will make my first configuration (the 2.0.33 kernel) boot by default.
Ok, now for another operating system, winNT in this case.
other=/dev/hda1
label=winnt
table=/dev/hda
Sometimes you'll need to use a `loader=' option, but I found that I didn't
need it and winNT boots fine for me like this. See the man pages for
lilo(8) and lilo.conf(5) for more details.
Aside: While I'm mentioning documentation, also see the Linux+NT-Loader
HOWTO, the Win95+Win+Linux mini-HOWTO, the LILO mini-HOWTO, and
probably various other HOWTOs (eg, BootPrompt HOWTO etc).
Now, after I run lilo, it will write a boot sector that will give me four
different ways to bootup (and hitting `Tab' will allow me to see them when
the LILO message comes up):
linux redhat winnt 2.1.100
(Yes, I have another entry for the 2.1.100 development kernel).
If I just hit Enter (or let it timeout) then the default will happen. If I
type in the name of the config I want to boot up, then is the one that will
happen.
Just add more "other=" entries for each (non-linux) operating system you
want to boot up (like dos or win95 or os/2 or whatever).
Didn't I say it was easy?
Good luck!
(BTW, if you want to use games [esp. DirectX5], multimedia and so on, then
you'd be better off sticking with win95 rather than "graduating" to NT...
NT still has some way to go before it is ready for "prime time". Although
it is a much better development and networking/application platform than
win95 can ever hope to be).
Oh, one thing about all this... you probably need to have boot sectors for
each of your operating systems in places where they are "accessable" by the
bios on your computer - which for most people is in an area below sector
1024 on the primary partition of your hard drive. And the partition needs
to be bootable. For example, if you have a nice big 6.4Gb hard drive, you
might think, "hey, I'll put a 100Mb DOS partition in /dev/hda6" (or
wherever), which happens to be located towards the last sectors of your
hard drive and well past the 1024 sector position. Nice thought, but there
is absolutely no way that you'll be able to get dos to boot from it (dosemu
could use it just fine, but you couldn't boot dos from it).
Cheers
Tony .
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