Annoying LILO / Win 2k / MBR problem

[Jomboni]

Ok, here are the circumstances from the past week.

Early in the week I tried installing Redhad 7.1. I was told that LILO no longer needed to be installed before the 1024th cylinder, so I went ahead and made a linux partition at the end of my drive, and installed it, putting LILO in the MBR. I could boot into Linux just fine, but my machine would hang when I started Windows.

So, I tried again. This time, at the front of the drive I made a small 100 meg linux partition, and a larger 10 gig one at the end of the drive, with the Windows partition in the middle. The small partition was /boot, and the big one was /. I did this because this is how it was set up on my old system, and it worked fine. So I reinstalled, and I wound up with the same problem as before.

I could avoid all this and just make a boot disk... but I don't have a floppy drive! I don't even have room in my case for another drive, it's so crowded in there :( So I was wondering if anybody had any other things I should try. This is a fresh installation of Windows so I'm not too worried about losing it, but I'd still rather not...

[bdg1983]

You probably had it correct the first time, but you just needed to setup /etc/lilo.conf to boot both Linux and Windows.

What not just put it back the way it was (without the /boot partition) and after all is installed, post your lilo.conf and we can help you with the proper configuration.

[Jomboni]

I think I'll do that. But now that Redhat 7.2 just came out, I'm in the process of downloading that and I'm going to try that instead, which brings me to another related question!

GRUB vs. LILO - now that Redhat has both of these, which would you recommend?

[bdg1983]

I've always used Grub and never Lilo.

If you have the choice, pick Grub as you do not have to remember to run anything after making changes to /boot/grub/menu.lst as you have to for Lilo.

[Jomboni]

Ok, so I installed RH 7.2 using grub, and it's working just fine now! I can boot to Windows or Linux with no problems, and the setup was incredibly easy. I have all the basics set up except for my internet connection, which for some reason wasn't configured automatically like it was in 7.1, but I'm working on it. But, unlike 7.1, my tv card was set up and xawtv installed automatically.

[Jomboni]

That was certainly easy enough!

[m3rlin]

Well what you could do is simple, install first linux on the first partition ,then install the win2000 and record the MBR on the disk, this will delete the MBR of linux and start up linux in auto, so far so good, login on your system with a boot disk , edit lilo.conf like this, i will assume that the HD is primary master.

boot = /dev/hda
vga = normal
read-only
message = <path> # this is if you wish a message on the prompt "lilo: "
prompt
timeout = 1000 # 1 minute to chose your image
image = /boot/<you linux image> vmlinuz (mine)
label = linux
root = /dev/hda3

image = /boot/<second image if you have> #i do in case there's problems on booting the first image
label = suse(can give what name you wish)
root = /dev/hda3

# Windows Boot

other = /dev/hda4 # will probebly be this one
labe = dos (or windows, as you wish)
loader = /boot/chain.b
table = /dev/hda

save the changes, and run lilo, with this when you boot your system you will be asked in a prompt for image to load, you can do windows or linux, in this case you can press enter, and you have a minute to comply.
if you windows does't not start up that means that you boot could not be hda4, check the info on the boot of linux, it usualy says what partitions he found, can use the command dmesg.This worked fine with me, by this way i menage to have 3 diferent S.O in the same drive, this is not perfect but it worked, you can edit the boot.ini on the windows and specify the linux boot, i thing is boot.ini at least in windows nt 4.0 that's the file.
Sorry if this sounds confusing, im already confused with all this writhing, i hope in the middle of this i could be in someway of a help to you
Hasta!