Booting linux

[thunderrooster]

Hello everyone.I have a freind who wanted to try out linux.I suggested Mandrake.So I went over there with my disk and install LM 8.0 on his comp.Here is the promblem,when we tell the bios to bootup to his harddrive you just see a blinking curser.He has the new dual amd motherboard.It has onboard scsi and onboard ide.He also has a Adaptic 3200s scsi controller.He has 3 harddrives on the Adaptic as raid 0 with windows 2000 on it.On the onboard ide controller he has a western digital 30 gb harddrive.He has an ibm harddrive on the onboard scsi.We did not have a single promblem install it.The only thing is that we cant boot linux unless we use the boot floppy.I checked everything out,everything looked alright to me.Lilo is setup to boot to sda5.Sda5 is his root partition.We intalled linux on the on the ibm harddrive.The western digital harddrive is the primary master in the bios.But you can change what drive you want to boot to.I tried the text and graphical lilo.I tried grub.But nothing works.I would appreciate any help.If you any more info just email me at thunderrooster@hotmail.com.

Thank You,
Thunderrooster

[slapNUT]

We intalled linux on the on the ibm harddrive.The western digital harddrive is the primary master in the bios.But you can
change what drive you want to boot to.


So what happens when you boot off that IBM drive? What does your lilo.conf look like.

[bdg1983]

Here's an article from Caldera that MAY help with using Grub.

Description:

The system fails to boot after installing linux to a second hard drive. It just displays "stage1" on the screen and hangs.

Solution:

After installing eDesktop, without rebooting the system, open a console screen (Press Ctrl-Alt-F1) and login as root. If you have already rebooted and cannot get the system to boot, then boot using the installation cd. See the BOOTING FROM CDROM section below.

Edit the /etc/grub.conf file using vi or your favorite text editor (type "vi /etc/grub.conf" and press enter.) If you need help with the vi editor, see this faq:
http://support.calderasystems.com/caldera?solution&11-991104-0005&130-941758405

The /etc/grub file will look similar to the following:
root (hd1)
install /boot/grub/stage1 (hd0,0) /boot/grub/stage2 0x8000 (hd1,0)/boot/grub/menu.lst
quit

root (hd1) - Indicates that the root mount point is on the second hard drive. The first hard drive is (hd0).

The GRUB program is large enough that it has been broken into multiple parts or stages. Stage1 is small enough to be loaded into the master boot record or the boot sector of any partition. Stage1 then loads Stage2 which in turn looks for a file called menu.lst (by default, menu.lst is located in /boot/grub.) When Stage1 and Stage2 are located on separate drives the install line must be modified to look like the following:
install /boot/grub/stage1 (hd0,0) d (hd0) /boot/grub/stage2 0x8000 (hd1,0)/boot/grub/menu.lst
Note the addition of the "d (hd0) parameter.
Save these changes and then run the following command from the console prompt:
grep -v ^# /etc/grub.conf | grub --batch

BOOTING FROM CDROM:

You can use the eDesktop 2.4 install CD to boot into your system. Boot up your computer with your install cdrom in the drive. Highlight the Standard Install on the menu (or the cautious install, if you know that this is necessary for your hardware). Then press the letter 'e'. This will display three lines of parameters that you can edit. The first line should say "root (fd0)" The second line is a list of kernel parameters, and the third line specifies the initrd.

Highlight the second line, and hit 'e' to edit it.
At the end of this line, add root=/dev/<the linux partition> BOOT_IMAGE=boot

for example to boot from /dev/hda2 you would type at the end of the second line root=/dev/hda2 BOOT_IMAGE=boot

After editing the line, press enter to leave the edit mode, and press 'b' to boot. This should work on both IDE and SCSI.