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MaXimum SMOKE · 11-28-2002, 06:48 PM

With regard to the hard drive having Linux on it being bootable.... Pretty much as Statica advised.... It does not have to be a bootable device. Not by the standards that a BIOS would call a drive bootable. What should happen, is that the bootmanager in the master boot record of the 1st hard drive (the real bootable device) gets read in. According to the choice you would make at the menu, it transfers the boot to the operating system you choose. If linux is on a slave drive on the secondary ide, at this point, and you select it to boot, the linux OS will be read in and booted regardless of the fact that the slave drive all by itself is not a boot device. The boot process was already initiated. One point to be made here is that a linux loader sets up according to the configuration it finds at the time it is installed. If you later change the physical order of the drives either by cable swapping, or otherwise, a program like lilo will probably try to find linux, or anything else, in the wrong place, and crash. Some people do not care to use LILO as a boot manager when they are using OSes like Win 2000. There are other ways of booting without LILO in the MBR, but I personally can't advise you on this.
Note I am unclear at this point as to what the 'Promise' software is doing and what part it plays in the boot process... If this is geometry modifying software and has to be read in before your ide controllers work right..... Then you can't use lilo in the mbr, and this may just be be beginning of your multi-boot problems....

11-28-2002, 06:48 PM	#9
MaXimum SMOKE Member (8 bit) Join Date: Mar 2002 Posts: 229	With regard to the hard drive having Linux on it being bootable.... Pretty much as Statica advised.... It does not have to be a bootable device. Not by the standards that a BIOS would call a drive bootable. What should happen, is that the bootmanager in the master boot record of the 1st hard drive (the real bootable device) gets read in. According to the choice you would make at the menu, it transfers the boot to the operating system you choose. If linux is on a slave drive on the secondary ide, at this point, and you select it to boot, the linux OS will be read in and booted regardless of the fact that the slave drive all by itself is not a boot device. The boot process was already initiated. One point to be made here is that a linux loader sets up according to the configuration it finds at the time it is installed. If you later change the physical order of the drives either by cable swapping, or otherwise, a program like lilo will probably try to find linux, or anything else, in the wrong place, and crash. Some people do not care to use LILO as a boot manager when they are using OSes like Win 2000. There are other ways of booting without LILO in the MBR, but I personally can't advise you on this. Note I am unclear at this point as to what the 'Promise' software is doing and what part it plays in the boot process... If this is geometry modifying software and has to be read in before your ide controllers work right..... Then you can't use lilo in the mbr, and this may just be be beginning of your multi-boot problems.... Last edited by MaXimum SMOKE; 11-28-2002 at 07:11 PM.