Michael....the reason your Linux installation won't boot from
the hard drve, but will boot from the floppy is as follows. The
linux kernal must reside on a partition that ends before the
1024th cylinder of the drive it's located on. The boot floppy
has the kernel on it, so it boots your installation fine, but
you can't boot from the hard drive.
To use BootMagic, it's configuration program must be located on
the primary master drive on a partition (fat16 or fat32) that
ends before the 1024th cylinder.
To get your computer to dual boot with either lilo or BootMagic
(stick with lilo for starters as I'm a bit unsure about your
BootMagic installation at this time) as the boot manager do the
following. Shrink your windows partition by about 10-15 meg at
the beginning of the drive and then create a primary linux
native partition in that empty space.
You can then either reinstall Linux using the new small Linux
partition as /boot (/boot is it's mount point). Go ahead and
install lilo on the mbr (you can change to bootmagic later if
you want to.
Or you can boot into linux with your boot floppy and go through
a bunch of stuff to make the new partition into the new /boot
directory (I'll not detail that yet).
The only thing that is confusing to me here is that you state
that you installed bootmagic on that 10 gig partition (8 gig is
at the 1024th cylinder limit) and it normally won't allow you to
do that.
Alan
Michael Rowland wrote:
>
> Hello all,
>
> I am having difficulty trying to setup dual booting using Boot magic with
> WIN95/LINUX. My boot floppy boots fine into LINUX Mandrake 7.0, but I would
> like to not have to fumble around with a boot floppy disk.
>
> Now for the story...I used partition magic 5.0 to setup my partition for
> LINUX and also loaded Bootmagic 2.0. In my initial installation of LINUX I
> get a error message when I get to the section on setting up Dual-Booting to
> either Windows or LINUX. In the area of "Install bootloader" I get the error
> message installation of LILO failed. The following error occurred:
> geo_comp_addr: cylinder number is too big (1171>1023)". I have two
> harddrives on my system a WD 13.6 GB and a Maxtor 6.4 GB. I have loaded
> LINUX on my WD 13.6 GB with a logical partition. WIN95 is also loaded onto
> my WD 13.6 GB harddrive. I am unclear about the 1024 cylinder limit which I
> am fairly sure is causing the problem. I have roughly 3 GB allocated for
> LINUX and 10.6 GB for WIN95.
>
> What do I need to do in order to enable Bootmagic to boot either from WIN95
> or LINUX??
>
> Please bear with me because I am relatively new learning about how to setup
> my partitions on my PC.
>
> Thanks in advance,
