On Sunday 03 December 2000 23:35, you wrote:
> I have a dual boot computer with W2K and Mandrake 7.2 on it. The Windows
> boots from drive C: and the Mandrake is on /dev/hdb5 . When it was
> installing I was asked which drive the Linux was booting from and I said
> /dev/hdb5. I then made a backup boot disk for the Linux. The problem is
> that my computer will only boot Linux from the floppy and if I try to boot
> it from the Lilo in the MBR I get an error message that /dev/hdb5 is not
> bootable. How do I make my Linux partition bootable so that I won't need
> to use the rescue diskette to boot it. Both W2K and Linux show up as
> options in the lilo menu. I have checked the lilo.conf to make sure that
> the Linux is pointing to /dev/hdb5 and have rerun lilo several times.
>
> Thanks. ...Dave
Stop right where you are!! Don't hose anything--it's not that hard, I dual
boot NT and W2K with Linux on lots of defferent boxes. From your
description, it looks like LILO may be installed exactly where it should
be--hdb5. My experience has been that NT/W2K doesn't like to boot from LILO,
so you'll need to use the NT bootloader to boot and choose your operating
systems. So, once you have your system booting W2K perform the following
steps:
Do everything in Linux as root
1. Boot Linux with your boot disk
2. Mount your floppy drive (its probably already mounted, but just in case
it's not the command is #mount -t msdos /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy
3. Put a DOS formatted floppy in the drive and type:
dd if=/dev/hdb5 bs=512 count=1 of=/mnt/floppy/boot.Lnx
Remember, if LILO ain't on hdb5, you'll have to change the command to
reflect where it actually is. What you did is copy LILO to a DOS floppy and
named the LILO file "boot.Lnx"
4.Close Linux and reboot into W2K
Now you need to write the floppy's boot.Lnx to the W2K "boot.ini"
5. Open Explorer and copy the boot.Lnx file to the root of your W2K drive
6. Using Notepad, open the "boot.ini" and add the line
c:\boot.Lnx="Mandrake 7.2 "
to the end of the file
This is what mine looks like:
[boot loader]
timeout=10
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)WINNT="Microsoft 2000 Professional" /fa
c:\boot.Lnx="Mandrake 7.2"
7. Right click on "My Computer", click on "properties"--this brings up the
System Properties window. Click on the "Advanced" tab and the "Startup and
Recovery" button at the bottom. If the first check box is unchecked put a
check in it and then set the number of seconds to display before booting into
the Default OS.
8. With no floppies in the drive, reboot and you should see your operating
system choices.
For anyone using WINNT, you might have to write your boot.ini file, because
your's may be blank. Then at step #6 you'll need to drop to an MSDOS prompt
and type:
C:>attrib -s -r boot.ini
Then write your boot.ini file and reset your attributes by typing:
C:>attrib +r +s boot.ini
