DUAL BOOT BOOTSECT.LNX

[The_Hammer]

HELP!!
Creating a dual boot for Linux on a separate hard on ide 1. Winows 2k server on primary.

When I modify the boot.ini and add linux on as another os. I point the linux part to BOOTSECT.lnx after copying the bootsect.lnx from my /hdc1 and placing it on the C: drive along with the boot.ini when I try to boot into RedHat 7.1 all I get is "LI" and a black screen anyone have any ideas on how to fix the problem? :confused: :confused:

[Tyr-7BE]

Give General Linux Questions and this forum a search...VERY common problem that a lot of people know the answer to...I don't, but I know it's there :)

<edit>dunno what you'd search for..."LI"? But that would get you a whole lot of results.

[ 06 May 2001: Message edited by: Tyr-7BE ]

[mongrel]

I've had this same problem, I think. Let see if I understand what you are saying. You have two hard-drives connected to ide1. The master has Win2K and you installed RH on the slave.

I had a the same problem when I did exactly what you did. This is how I solved it:

I created a small (23MB) ext2 partition near the beginning of the master. This I mounted as /boot. The rest of the RH installation I put on the slave drive like before. During lilo install I chose to install to the /boot partition, which on my drive is hda2. I then peeled off bootsect.lnx and edited boot.ini. Be sure you have created a bootdisk for RH or you won't be able to access RH at all if things go wrong.

[ph34r]

You need to re-strip the boot sector off each time you run lilo.

I have the same setup as you (nearly) and it works fine.

[mongrel]

I thought the same thing when I originally tried it. I had Win2K on primary IDE master and tried to put Linux on secondary IDE master. I did the whole bootsect.lnx thing and when I would choose Linux from the Win2K boot menu all I would get is:

Li..

and it would stop there. I'd have to do a hard shutdown to get out of it. The only thing that solved it was placing that small /boot partition on my primary IDE master near the front of the drive. There could also be another way though that I've not seen suggested on this board. I'm not sure of what kind of hardware you have but most newer BIOS have an option as to which HDD to boot from first. HDD-0, HDD-1, etc. If you already have RH 7.1 installed on the second drive you could try installing lilo onto the MBR of that drive and set that to be the first boot device in the BIOS. Although having to switch the boot order in the BIOS everytime you want to change OS seems just as bad as having to boot from a floppy each time. If you've got the space I'd suggest going with putting the /boot partition on the primary IDE master.

I believe the reason why it doesn't work the way we both originally tried is this:
Lilo is just pointing to the kernel image, which then uncompresses and mounts the / partition. The kernel also tells where all the other devices are located. Bootsect.lnx, is just the MBR of the partition you peeled it off of. If you peel that boot-record off of one device and stick it on another it becomes confused and hence the Li..

This is pretty simplistic and I'm sure flawed. I am open up to any clarification and corrections. The more I think about it the more I want to know why the original setup fails :confused:

[rekursion]

Hmm, I run a similar setup with win2k and had that 'LI' problem before, but it was because I recompiled the kernel and forgot to run lilo then copy the bootsect.lnx to disk before rebooting. If you made any changes to kernel or lilo, but your bootsect is older, this is likely the cause. Other than that I don't see any flaws with it.

[mjb0314]

Why not just use lilo to boot win2k? It works great with my setup (win2k on hda, MDK 8 on hdb). If you do decide to go with the other method, here's another howto that is a little bit easier to follow. It's written for caldera, but it should work with any distro.: http://www.caldera.com/SxS/ntboot.htm

Good Luck!