dual boot q's

[fudtone]

I have 4 drives;
12g IBM has mandrake 9.1
27g WD has 98se
cd-rom
2g slow poke (fat)

prefer to keep 2 via a Promis ultra66 but not the WD or CD as they are ata100 (I hate slaves when they slow me down).

I want to keep the WD as my primary master.

I would like to keep the IBM and Slow Poke on my Promis.

Linux was installed by moving the IBM to PM, it works fine when there.

My bios alows me to choose boot drive on the fly when choosing the IBM (via promis) Linux wont load and I get hde lost interrupts.

Im linux noob so if there is some basics of bootloaders (lilo/grub) I don't understand please let me know ( i belive this is the issue) I choose the MBR option First Sector when installing (other options were listed)

I will be happy to re-install Linux if helpfull.

[bailey]

the boot info must be on the main drive to dual boot

linux must be on a logical drive on the primary boot partition so that the boot loader can be installed on that drive, or in other words the mount point for linux.

the dual boot and the automatic installation of linux works best when unalicated free space is on the same partition ans xp is on, do not even creat the second logical partition as linux will do that for you, just have about 20 gig of free space it can use.

one of the install options is to leave the partitions as they are and to use the free space, so it don't want a partition to be there, it wants free unallocated free space.

for linux ver 9.1 red hat

[fudtone]

Thanks for the feedback Bailey,
I would like to use the seperate drive for linux.

Is there a way at this point I can install or re-install a boot loader to address the linux I currentley have?

[bailey]

I think you would have to use the manual set up for that then , its called disk drud and I can't help much on that, problem is you need to have the root and mount point on the same boot disk, I think,
anyway I am not sure how to set up two differant drives.

[kilgoretrout]

You can easily use a separate drive to install linux; in fact it's preferable to do it that way. You do not need to switch your boot drive in your bios to multiboot with linux and windows. The linux bootlader, lilo, will automatically detect an existing windows installation and create an entry for it in the lilo boot menu. Make sure you install windows first and install it to the drive designated as your boot drive in the bios(that's the windows drive) In fact, windows will insist upon being put there; it's pretty inflexible in that regard. Install mandrake second to the drive you want. You can even leave the linux drive unpartitioned and the install program will automatically partition and format it for you. The options are pretty self explanatory during the install. During the install make sure that the linux boot loader, lilo by default, is installed to the mbr of the boot drive(your windows drive), also the default option.
Finally, before you install linux, make sure you have the drives configured to the place you want on the ide bus. You can't move drives around in linux without doing a lot of hand editing of certain configuration files beforehand and you probably don't want to get into that just yet. For example, in the lilo configuration file you have to tell lilo where the linux root partition is located on the ide bus; it can't boot w/o that info. So if you move your linux drive around lilo will still look for the linux root partition where it was last time and if it's not there you'll get an error message and linux won't boot.
By the way, linux could care less whether it's hard drive is set up as bootable so there is no need to partition the drive and set the partition as bootable; in fact that could just add to your confusion if your multibooting with windows. Your much better off not marking the linux drive as bootable when multibooting with windows. The lilo boot loader can boot it anyway.

[bailey]

thanks for that info, I was confused on that point.

never played with this stuff before. I tried it with two drives and got confused about the mount point and the boot loader with two seperate drives,
but it is starting to make sence to me now.

the documation on this stuff is not real clear on how to's.
so its trial and error with me so far, playing with simba right now.

[fudtone]

Awesome kilgoretrout you nailed it.

I had to slave my CD but it worked. Now I need to get that addressed back to my promis somehow.

Everything works but the lan connection, That I can most likely figure out in due time on a working system.


Thank You!!!