Dual booting Windows 2K with RH Enterprise Workstation v3

[Mark Knecht]

On Sun, 3 Oct 2004 13:37:25 -0700, Silverrod <silverrod at comcast.net> wrote:
<SNIP>
> 
>         What is System Commander and where can I find out more about it

http://www.v-com.com

> 
> 1) A Linux installation is really sort of 2 pieces - Linux itself
> (possibly spread over multiple partitions and disk drives) and a boot
> loader. I presume that you used grub. (Maybe LILO though? Is that
> what's meant by boot.ini? I haven't used LILO in a long time, and it
> won't matter for what I might say here...I think...)
> 
>         I used Disk Druid because that is what came up when I selected the
> manual installation method instead of the automatic option which I think
> uses LiLo.  Boot.ini is a file inside of W2K that is intended to
> allow/facilitate dual booting. I used it because it was suggested in some of
> the reading I have done of dual booting.

OK. However, the 'tricky' part here is the LILO installation which I
don't know much about. Part of the problemcould be that LILO possibly
has to be on the first drive Like windows does. Not sure. I'm
assumming that Linux really is on the second drive or else Windows
would be gone. (Windows is still there, right?)

> 
> 2) It's clear that you believe you installed Linux on the second hard
> drive, but it's not so clear where the boot loader whet. where do you
> think it is?
> 
>         Per instructions in RHEW installation guide I created a 100 Megabyte
> partition at the very beginning of the new drive. During the installation
> Disk Druid ask where you want the boot file to go. I pointed to the above
> drive and partition.  I can not confirm if it got there or not because W2K
> explorer will not acknowledge that that partition exists after it is
> formatted for Linux. I can't open it to see what's in there if anything.

OK, so a very good solution for you would be to download a copy of
Knoppix and burn that to a CD. With Knoppix you can boot to Knoppix
Linux from the CD and run without installing anything on any of your
hard drives. It will allow you to look at your hard drives, see the
partitions and make sure everything looks correct.

> 
> 3) Windows is the same in terms of the OS and a boot loader. However
> Windows boot loader must reside on the first hard drive seen by BIOS.
> As understand things it cannot work itit was to be in the seond drive.
> 
>         The SATA drive is the first one seen by the BIOS and I have not
> placed any Linux stuff there except the pointer in the boot.ini.  I may have
> a problem here!

I am thinking that a limitation of LILO may be that it won't run on a
second drive as you are trying to do. This is just a guess. You need
to Google before taking ANY actions based on what I'm saying. You may
need to install grub, which both Otto and I are more comfortable with,
to get this configuration to work. I just don't know.

Another problem could be the way LILO is configured. It's possible
that LILO saw your 'second' drive as the only drive during the
installation in which case it would not have set it up correctly. You
could fix this by installinggrub and being very astute about how you
configure it. this is not a 'basic' install and we'd want to be
careful about what you did.

As a short term check, you could try unplugging the SATA drive. When
it isn't found then presumably the system would find the second drive
and boot from it. It would be a fairly simple test I think.


> 
> 4) No matter what you have on your system, the only boot loaders
> youhave a chance of using are ones that can be seen by BIOS, so this
> changes a bit from system to system, but usually it's jsut the first
> hard drive.
> 
>         Otto has said essentially the same thing. I don't know how to get it
> there.  Can you help with this? Remember that Linux doesn't recognizes the
> SATA hard drive.

Linux doesn't but BIOS does. I'm thinking this is part of the problem.
The way the system is numbering disks is inconsistent based on where
you are in the boot process.

> 
>    I'm sort of guessing here that when you installed Linux that
> possibly grub or LILO partially installed on the frist drive and
> what's happening is windows boot loader is messed up and needs to be
> reinstalled. I believe this can be done from your Windows rescue disk.
> (You have one, right?)
> 
>         Windows rescue disk?????????

guess not, but it sounds like your windows system is still intact,
right? I'd suggest makign one the nvery next time you boot into
windows. This presumes that you have a floppy on the machine.

Good luck,
Mark