>From a private email back to the list, this breaks the thread for
threading news/mail readers, sorry for that. :-/
On 06 Mar, Declan Moriarty <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Mon, 06 Mar 2000, Stefan Bellon wrote:
[snip]
> > Alright, did it just now with a floppy disc, and the offsets are
> > both the same. But - who wonders - booting into Linux from floppy
> > *does* work.
> That blows my theory out of the water. If the boot sectors are in the
> same place, then it is not being seen as a valid boot sector.
I've now looked at the boot sector in the DOS diskedit program and it
looks exactly the same as it looks when doing "dd if=/dev/hda bs=512
count=1 | hex" in Linux. Hmmm.
The only thing which makes me wonder ATM is, that diskedit reports the
geometry of my hard disc as:
Sides: 128 Tracks: 524 Sectors: 63
Whereas Linux tells me:
Cylinders: 525 Heads: 128 Sectors: 63
There's a difference of 1 concerning the heads/sides. And the excuse
"Depends on whether you count from 0 or from 1" doesn't count, as
diskedit shows (in some other window): "Cylinder: 0 - 523".
> Going with your 'One Op System' theory, it might be virus protection
> algorithms, as they are very fussy about things being done using the
> dos interrupt calls, which linux, of course, doesn't use.
Well, that's what a friend of mine told me as well. But you may guess:
I don't have an option to turn off in the BIOS setup. :-/
> There might be a very very lazy way out of this. Would it work with
> NT's boot loader? There's good blurb on setting that up in a mini
> howto "DOS-Linux-NT-HOWTO" or somesuch.
Yes, I know, with the NT bootloader it works. That's what I had
installed on my 10 GB disk. The LILO bootsector was a 512 byte file
which was started by the NT bootloader. That works.
[snip]
> > Where do I get this lread from? This sounds the easiest way to start
> > with. :-}
> >
> Well it's on my distribution in the dosutils section - probably in
> yours too.
I'll have to look. There's a DOS program in a Linux distribution? I'll
have to check. (Right, loadlin is present in the distribution as well)
> > BTW: From the LILO author I got another idea I'll try first of all.
> > He suggested setting the partition type of the boot partition to a
> > DOS type and not to an ext2 type. Perhaps the BIOS checks this?
> > I'll try.
> When you get in this deep, it's good to stand back when you run out
> of ideas and review what you know. Improve on this, correct it and
> post it to the list.
Alright, that's what I've done now! ;-)
> Everything worked on the 10 Gig disk - including the lilo.
Well, I used the NT bootloader as I had Win 98, Win NT and Linux
installed. That worked fine. I'm pretty much sure that the Linux-only
solution wouldn't work on the 10 GB disc either. But with 2 GB I really
don't want to split. I want a Linux-only solution. And this doesn't
work as nicely as it should with LILO.
> But that disk kept crashing.
Yes, the second 10 GB Toshiba disc that crashed for me in less than one
year!
> It will not boot from a linux hda1, but it will from a dos hda1
Yes.
> The 2 gig disk worked and booted elsewhere
The 2 GB disc works and boots when Windows is installed, yes.
> Linux boots from the hd with the boot record on a floppy.
Yes.
> The system files are at the same offset from boot in a floppy. Are
> they similar in the hd?
Yes, when I look at the boot sector with the DOS diskedit program and
in Linux with dd, then I see the same things at the same offset=0.
> Installing a dos boot record didn't work to boot linux.
Yes.
Sad, isn't it?
Greetings,
Stefan.
--
Stefan Bellon * <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> * <http://www.sbellon.de/>
If something appears to be too good to be true, it probably is.
