Newbie question.

[Joe Slow]

I have an old computer that had two hard drives installed. The smaller 1 gig hard drive had windows 95 and the bigger 6 gig hard drive was split into about 4 or 5 partitions. I took out the smaller drive and swiped the larger to prepare to install Red Hat Linux. After I finished to install I rebooted without my boot disk or the red hat disk and it told me that I had an invalid system disk, replace and ... blah blah blah.. What is wrong here? And no I don't have any disks in the floppy or CD rom drives

[FoBoT]

there is no boot info on the second drive
why are you trying to boot without a boot disk?
what OS is on this second drive?

are you trying to use a boot loader/boot manager??

[Joe Slow]

Redhat linux is installed on the second drive and after I installed it said to remove the boot disk and the redhat cd. So do I need to start it with the boot disk? All the one that I have does is enable the linux install from CD because my CD-ROM is not bootable. How can I put boot info on the drive?

[bdg1983]

Try 'fdisk /mbr' from a dos/windows bootdisk.

[compunuts]

Did you also enable to boot from HDD or did you opted to boot from boot disk? Try what mdwatt said since it's easier to do then if not, reinstall and choose boot from HDD auto when it asked for your boot method.

HTH

[Joe Slow]

What's with the /mbr option for fdisk? I tried it and it didn't even give me any output, all it did was return to the A: prompt.

[FoBoT]

i think that is what it is supposed to do, but i can't try it here at home, no play pc sitting here

[Joe Slow]

Hmm well it didn't fix anything.. I deleted the extra partitions on the hard drive with fdisk and am going to try to reinstall linux because apparently my C: drive is empty...

[Linuxcool]

That's right. When you run ' fdisk /mbr ', you don't get any output ,if there were no errors.

That message you got about being an ' invalid system disk ', that sounds just like the message I get when I try to bootup into msdos from a floppy that doesn't have the msdos operating system on it.

How about some more information on your on installation. Like where did you tell red hat to install lilo and is your 6G hard drive connected as primary master or primary slave.

After you ran ' fdisk /mbr ', did you try to boot into linux again. If so, what happened?

[Joe Slow]

The install didn't ask me about lilo, in fact it couldn't even run the graphical install it had to to the textual one. Basically all it asked was language, keyboard layout, time zone, what type of install(workstation was what I chose), then there was the mouse configuration and that's about it.
Oh yeah and I did try to boot it after I ran fdisk /mbr and it was a no go. Same invalid system disk error.

[ 10 April 2001: Message edited by: Joe Slow ]

[brasso]

Let me just clarify a few things that are (for me, at least) foggy. Then someone else may be able to answer better.

The smaller 1 gig hard drive had windows 95 and the bigger 6 gig hard drive was split into about 4 or 5 partitions. I took out the smaller drive and swiped the larger to prepare to install Red Hat Linux.

The smaller drive was the primary master? You 'swiped' the 2nd drive???? That is what is bothering me, what is 'swiped'?

If the small disk (with Windows) is now gone(?) doing a fdisk/mbr wouldn't reenable you to boot back into Windows. If the small disk is truly now gone, the 6G disk can be hooked up as primary master for the install. Either thru jumpering the drives, or if cable selected, just put it on the other connector.

I am a very newbie (see my listing) but I have fought this particular problem (trying to put RH7 on a secondary (slave) drive) enough to be a veteran of that snafu. I advise you to avoid the secondary drive at all costs and put RH7 on the primary master if no other OS will be existing on this machine.
Earl

[Linuxcool]

OK. Make sure your hard drive is on the primary ide channel and that it is set to be the primary master. Reboot. If you still can't it to work, you might be able to enter rescue mode. Follow these instructions here (http://www.redhat.com/support/manuals/RHL-7-Manual/ref-guide/s1-sysadmin-rescue.html)

What you're going to do is start up a separate running version of linux. Then you're going to make a directory to mount the root partition of the linux you're trying to recover. Use fdisk to get the partition number of the root directory. Next mount the partition, then run the lilo command. You'll have to type the complete path list to lilo, because it's not one of the commands available in rescue linux. Example: ' /foo/sbin/lilo '. That's if your newly created directory is called ' foo '. After you run lilo, unmount the partition then reboot.

One other thing, I found out that when red hat does a workstation install, it writes lilo automatically to the MBR.

By the way, when you installed linux didn't you make a boot disk when it asked if you wanted to?

[ 10 April 2001: Message edited by: Linuxcool ]

[Joe Slow]

The second drive I reformated and the first one is junk. I reinstalled and made a boot disk this time and it works fine, except when I boot without the disk so thanks for the lilo info. I'll see if that works when I get home. And the secondary drive is the primary master on the rebuilt computer.