Triple Boot Blues

[HaggisBones]

Hi All,

*** Newbie Alert! Proceed with caution. ***

I recently decided to try out linux at home. I already had Win 98SE and XP installed on one hard disk so I installed RedHat 9.0 on another hard disk. Install went fine so I rebooted ... default Windows boot up menu came up :(. Ok, just needed to change the bios boot order I thought. Changed it over and sure enough the Grub menu now came up and allowed me to boot into RedHat. Great! I rebooted to check I could load Windows from the Grub menu ... selected the Windows option, got the chainloader +1 message up and ... zip, nada, nout :(. Eek! Had I knackered the win install? I quickly reverted the bios and checked. Nope, all was ok there. Que?

I reloaded RedHat and had a look at the menu.lst file and device.map file. Both looked fine (Windows boot below):

title Windows XP
rootnoverify(hd1,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

I tried adding:

title Windows 98 SE
rootnoverify(hd1,0)
makeactive
chainloader /bootsect.dos

No change. Still stalls after the chainloader command.

Help! My only idea is that this is a problem with the way my drives are connected. I have a Abit BE6 motherboard which has a Highpoint HPT366 UDMA66 disk controller on it. The Windows disk is on this controller, the Linux disk is on the conventional IDE controller. I can't put the Linux disk on the UDMA66 bus because of bios limitations of the HPT366.

Has anybody got any ideas how I can get the Grub menu to boot Windows? :confused:

Cheers,
HaggisBones

[hard candy]

Try "title Windows XP (98?)
rootnoverify(hd1,0)
makeactive
chainloader (hd1,0)+1".
Which windows is on the first partition?
Good luck.

[HaggisBones]

Thanks for the reply hard candy. I'll give that a try this evening.

My Windows hd has a 2G FAT32 first partition for Windows 98SE then a 40G NTFS partition for XP. I let the RedHat installer setup my other hard disk.

Cheers,
HaggisBones

[HaggisBones]

Tried hard candy's idea but it didn't work for me I'm afraid. Is this something to do with grub not being installed in the MBR of the windows boot partition or something like that?

Cheers,
HB

[hard candy]

Yep, grub needs to be installed in the MBR in order to boot everything.

[bosox79]

Originally posted by hard candy
Yep, grub needs to be installed in the MBR in order to boot everything.

Grub needs to be installed on to the MBR of your primary master disk in order to boot multiple OS's you may find the info in this thread helpful also Replacing LILO with GRUB check out mahdi's 4th post (http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=102959&highlight=tripple+boot+with+grub)

I hope that helps :)

[HaggisBones]

I thought Grub could be installed in the first partition of a hard disk? Sure I read that in a manual somewhere?

I tried turning this on its head and using the nt bootloader to load linux instead. I used dd to dump out the linux bootsector and copied it to the first partition of the primary UDMA66 IDE drive. I then added it to the boot.ini file. When I rebooted and selected the linux option the screen cleared and I got a single message in the top left corner saying "GRUB_" and that was it. Wah! :confused:

I had used df to check where the boot partition was before I did the dd command so I think the bin file is ok but ... Is there any way of verifying the bin file?

I don't particularly want to change the MBR on the primary disk if at all possible.

Another thought I had - could this be attributable to where the disks reside? i.e.

IDE1 - M = DVD
IDE2 - M =CDRW, S=LINUX HDD
IDE3 (UDMA66) - M Windows HDD
IDE4 (UDMA66) - M Data HDD

I know that having the Linux HDD as a slave on the IDE2 bus is daft but I'm still waiting for Highpoint/ Abit to sort out that particular problem :rolleyes: (bios fix required).

Any more ideas?

Cheers,
HaggisBones

[hard candy]

This is a pretty straightforward grub/lilo howto:
grub/lilo (http://home.powertech.no/oyvinsat/a/en/howtoboot.html#grubmultiboot)

And your cables should be switched, the primary harddisk should be on ide0 (primary channel), the secondary could be on either but if you have a cdrw, I would keep hdd #2 on the primary channel also and put the cdrw on the ide1(secondary channel). It might be a little faster writing to the disk from the hd's. The primary ide socket is ususally closest to the edge of the board.

[freakmn]

If the XP loader is in your MBR right now (which it probably is), you can have it boot Linux and 98 with BootPart (http://www.winimage.com/bootpart.htm).

[HaggisBones]

Thanks for the suggestion freakmn. I tried Bootpart last night. It created the linux bin image and added to the boot.ini as it says it would. Unfortunately, when I rebooted and select "Linux" it just came up with a Bootpart message then went back to the other OS menu options.

I'm guessing that I probably didn't create the linux bin image right. At least with the dd method from Linux I got a GRUB_ message. I tried creating the image both with and without the LBA switch but to no avail.

I've come to the conclusion that I'm doing something a wee bit daft but I haven't got a clue what! :rolleyes:

The bootpart command I used was:

bootpart 2 LBA c:\bootsect.lnx Linux

Partition 2 was reported as the first Linux native partition and had a * next to it so I reckoned it was the right one - could be wrong though. Is there a way to disassemble the linux bin files to see exactly what it is trying to do?

Cheers,
HaggisBones