dual drive bootup problem

[Jim Li]

> 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>
> 

i went to bootpart site. according to what they have... it looks like
they required the bootup loader to be lilo instead of grub. so, i went
and copy the lilo executable from my other linux box and put it in
/sbin.. and i manually edit /etc/lilo.conf + grab a copy of
/boot/boot.b from my other machine. i went and change boot env
variable to boot=/dev/hdb1... i then ran lilo.. with a warning from
lilo that /dev/hdb1 is not the primary drive... which i simply ignore
since i know it is not. i reboot the system and ran bootpart... i then
have it grab the first 512 bytes of /dev/hdb1.. it then automatically
changes the boot.ini pointing to the /<path>/linux.bin that was
created on the previous step... reboot the machine again... and select
the linux partition... i got an endless 0101010101010101.... to
infinite...  i am seriously thinking of reinstalling fedora3... now,
my question is, is there a way to install lilo instead of grub with
fedora 3. i can't find a way to go around it.
appreciate your suggestion and solution,
-jim