multibooting win & linux

[onestep]

Hi all,
I've got 2K & XP on drives of their own (sharing an ide cable) & am able to dual-boot fine; but I want to get a Linux o/s on the same box. I have loaded linux esmith onto another drive but when that drive is fitted the box wont load any o/s. I am trying to put my msi dvdrom & the linux drive on the 2nd mobo ide cable. How do I connect & jumper these drives? I need a bootable cd drive - my msi burner is connected via an ide controller card and, so, is not bootable.

[LawyerRon]

The drives on the second IDE channel have to be jumpered as master and slave, however, (and I could be wrong) I believe your drive has to be the master on the primary IDE channel to load the OS.

BTW, I notice you are from Melbourne; do you know the Geoff Evans family?

[Byte 2.0]

Moved from General section. This is a better forum for this question.

Basically, I know you need the Boot record changed with normally Lilo to then get a boot menu for all your Operating Systems. However I am to young in Linux to explain how to set that up. I just know it is set up on my system.

[onestep]

Hi Lawyeron & byte,

No, I don't think I know Geoff & family.

With too drives already on the primary channel & booting, how can I get a third drive bootable? I had to put the 3rd drive in a p3 to get esmith loaded, then swap it back to my athlon and let it reconfig itself (with the win drives disconnected). When I reconnected all drives (the esmith drive was jumpered as master on the secondary channel) neither of my win o/s's would load completely - get to the setup screen. And the dvdrom wasn't bootable as slave. Maybe I simply need a bootmanager (as byte suggests), but don't I need linux on to use Lilo? I've never used a bootmanager so I'm a bit out of my depth on that score.

[Statica]

Linux supports booting the OS from any drive on your system, be it the 2nd 3rd, 4th ... nth drive. It also, out of the box supports booting multiple operating systems (much like the NT bootloader does so right now)
The best way to do it would be to set up your system exactly the way it is (with the XP & 2k drives connected on your system), and install Linux to your drive after booting the installation CD from your CD Drive. Linux should now be able to detect your other drives and at this stage you should be given 2 choices (it largely depends on which distrib of linux you are using):
A - the "pretty method" - installing a bootloader on your MBR (lilo or grub), and have it offer you a choice of operating systems during bootup. The obvious issues are if your linux version doesnt do it right, and u fail to make manual adjustments, then you might have your MBR temporarily unworking for the microsoft OS'. This usually works fine automatically .. but there is always that element of chance
B- create a bootdisk during the installation and use that to boot up linux with your floppy. Your system as such will be untouched, 2k & XP will boot up as before using the NT boot loader.

I'd recommend going for option B, and then later if you want manually installing lilo or grub.

[onestep]

Hi Statica,
I must be doing something wrong bigtime. I refitted the 3rd drive & jumpered as suggested; and every other/which way. Then I had to run sysrestore to get the win o/s's up. That's with an old 20gb seagate (with esmith loaded) and/or a new 80gb barracuda 7200. To top my morning off, I discovered that the mdk 8.2 I downloaded is flawed. Any suggestions? I've just finished my finals in logistics - not IT!

[MaXimum SMOKE]

I'm wondering if this other controller card, that you installed is causing the problems (Just a hunch..) Normally when you have a standard setup you wind up with up to 4 ide drives that Linux has to track primary ide becomes hda, the slave hdb
secondary ide becomes hdc, the slave hdd. You've added I guess another ide controller to the crowd. Depending upon how it is configured, it could possibly be adding to the grief. If I'm following this right... we would kind of hope that this drive became /dev/hde Personally I haven't had the best of luck with extra controllers in a box (your mileage may vary...) Some extra controllers have 'extra' BIOS chips onboard. This was done a lot when larger drives were produced and people had motherboards with older bioses that could not utilize them. Quite often a card was available that not only corrected this problem for the drive hooked to it, but also for the rest of the controllers in the box.... (This is just an avenue that may have to be explored....) Is this third party controller card supported by Linux?

[onestep]

The card is a CE3700 - a tech sold it to me for this purpose, but... But, then, all I know is: the win drives are connected through the 1st ide cable. 2k is on C:\, xp on D:\, the p3 workstation is read as J:\. My burner (R:\) is on the control card (I couldn't use it for anything bootable) & is picked up by most o/s's ok. My dvdrom (set as master; is on an ide cable by itself (S:\) & is picked up ok too. My mobo (gigabyte ga-7dxr+) has dual bios & mdk 9 will not play on it at all. Mdk 7.2, & esmith will. I have discovered that mdk 9 has an issue with raid. (I have to have the promise software installed (even if disabled) or the mobo will not boot.) To have any hope of installing another o/s on this box (palomino 2000+, 512 mbddr), I need to get a 3rd hard drive bootable. So the query becomes: How do I keep my dvdrom bootable & add the 3rd drive (which must, of course, be bootable too)? If I leave the dvd rom as master (bootable) & connect the 3rd drive on the same ide as slave it's not bootable. To date, to get linux (any Linux) on I've had to diconnect win drives for the install but, then, cannot reconfig after reconnect to get it all working. I must be missing something somewhere. But, before I use a boot manager I need to get the 3rd drive reconnected (How?) without the system crashing & in need of sysrestore. (I'm a very newbie to this expansion stuff as I'm a student of Logistics, not IT)

[MaXimum SMOKE]

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....

[onestep]

Since the first step invloves getting the 3rd drive operable, I'll fit it by itself, remove esmith & see if I can get it recognised with all drives connected before the next step in the installation process is atetmpted. I'll post back when that is done. I hope you guys can/will 'hold my hand' a little longer.

[onestep]

Esmith was trying to take over & so prevented the win drives from starting. The 3rd drive is now refitted & formatted to basic, ntfs (by xp). It is set as slave on the same cable as the dvdrom (jumpered as master). With the 1st drive listed as drive 0, the 3rd drive appears in comp management as disc 2 - basic. With the dramas I've had with mdk 9 , the unix.com forum suggests the cd's I have may be lacking something that the boxed set includes - and is needed for multiboooting (?). Mdk 7.2 will load (but I only have 1 of 2 cd's) but mdk 9 will not. Esmith is not really suitable for my application and I'm already 1300mb over for the month. I will download rdh 8.2 (or 3) in a couple of days & post back the results of the attempted installation. In the meantime, if anyone has any further thoughts, please feel free to post them. Remember, I'm barely off my learner plates - people like you guys help people like me get endorsements to our computer licences. Thanks for all comments to date. I'll go back to my Linux ebooks while I sit out the wait for the new download traffic month.