Dual Booting

[James T. Carver]

On Sunday 05 June 2005 01:41 pm, fedora-list-request at redhat.com wrote:
> > Message: 16
> > Date: Mon, 23 May 2005 21:47:31 +0100
> > From: Paul Howarth <paul at city-fan.org>
> > Subject: Re: dual drive bootup problem
> > To: For users of Fedora Core releases <fedora-list at redhat.com>
> > Message-ID: <1116881251.4628.225.camel at laurel.intra.city-fan.org>
> > Content-Type: text/plain
> >
> > On Mon, 2005-05-23 at 14:47 -0400, Jim Li wrote:
> > > hi,
> > > i am having problems trying to get a dual drive bootup to work. i
> > > check out the following link for help:
> > > http://www.linuxforums.org/tutorials/1/tutorial-3573.html
> > > and basically follow its instruction. my original config. is a dell
> > > machine (optiplex pentium III) with windows2000 on the primary ide
> > > drive (hda1). i want to add another (secondary) hard drive (hdb) to
> > > the machine. so i took my fedora 3 installation disks and tried
> > > installing them. i created three partitions + a swap ( /, /boot,
> > > /home, swap).  i use the option of putting the mbr not to the primary
> > > hard drive partition, hda1, which is my windows mbr, but a partition
> > > on the secondary hard drive (hdb1 or /boot). after installing, i
> > > reinsert disk1 to the cdrom to do a linux rescue, since the bootloader
> > > at this point still only boots up window2000 only. after mounting
> > > /mnt/sysimage which is hdb5 (the root dir, /), i mount /hda1 to
> > > /mnt/sysimage/mnt/windows (a directory i created to mount the C:/
> > > drive of windows). i did the following command: dd if=/dev/hdb1
> > > (/boot) of=/mnt/sysimage/mnt/windows/linux.bin bs=512 count=1, (which
> > > i believe is the mbr bootup image of fedora)... and basically move
> > > this binary file to hda1 (or C: drive), mv linux.bin
> > > /mnt/sysimage/mnt/windows. so after that i did an "exit" to reboot the
> > > system. after rebooting, i got into windows and modified the boot.ini
> > > file by adding one line at the end: c:\linux.bin="My Linux Partition".
> > > so i reboot the machine again.. and at the bootloader menu, i select
> > > the linux partition option. it brought up only one word "Grub"... and
> > > the system stops and never continues. my question is: is it possible
> > > that i did something wrong when i use fedora option to copy the mbr
> > > image to /dev/hdb1 (/boot)? i really don't want to have lilo be my
> > > dual bootloader 'cos that means i need to backup my windows stuff and
> > > reinstall windows as a secondary and not primary drive.
> >
> > You might find bootpart (http://www.winimage.com/bootpart.htm) an easier
> > way of doing this. It runs under Windows and will (a) write out an
> > appropriate boot sector file, and (b) edit your boot.ini accordingly.
> >
> > Paul.
> > --
> > Paul Howarth <paul at city-fan.org>
>
> previously, i had problems getting a dual bootloader for linux and
> window. the scenario is given above. i finally got my bootloader to
> work. and i like to share with everyone in this community my long
> (frustrating) but rewarding experience. my instruction to get this
> done is accurate with one major flaw.  and paul howarth was kind
> enought to recommend an alternative method that mirrors mine. the
> major point that i originally miss is certain older bios can only
> address the first 1024 cylinders of the first disk drive. so, if my
> mbr, ie. grub or lilo, is located beyond the first 1024 cylinders or
> on another hard disk... implementing my method or bootpart will not
> work. i need to give thanks to this guy, Ed B. Park. after getting his
> link:
> http://www.geocities.com/epark/linux/index.html
> via an internet search... i finally got my stuff to work. man, fedora
> core is really way beyond my time... ie. i have been working with
> redhat 7.1 for too long...
> sincerely,
> -jim

Dual booting with linux is very simple, and using grub installed on the MBR 
make it somewhat painless. In these days of large hard drives and such, 
almost all the worries about the 1024 limit are almost history. I have tried 
several programs to provide the functionality from within the $icrosoft 
enviornment ( including bootpart) and have found that "anything" that uses a 
FAT system to manage your boot partitions can turn out to be a total disaster 
if you have a power outage or an unclean restart.  you will not only lose the 
ability to boot at all, you also stand a good chance of wiping out all the 
file allocation tables in windows and the linux partitions as well. Personaly 
I have a 200gig drive split into two sections (XP and Fedora core 3) and 
another 200 gig split into FC4 and FreeBSD, all are under grub and work quite 
well without having to hack the MBR or use any kind of FAT 16 stuff. IMHO 
using anything that uses backwards technology to work around old problems is 
a bad idea to say the least.

James
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