Hi, everyone.

I'm a newbie again, having installed Mandrake (and a couple of other distributions) a few years ago and starting over again with 10.0 Official.

Like many others, I continue to have problems with dual booting. I've installed a couple of other distros several times over the past few days, and I always seem to be able to get the latest Linux install to dual boot with Windows XP, but lose any that I had installed previously. I just get more and more flustered.

I thought I'd found the answer in "Linux In a Nutshell". They suggest installing the Linux boot loader to the boot sector of the Linux partition, then copying it to the Windows partition, and adding an entry to the Windows boot menu.

Fine...I thought. I'll create LILO in the Linux partition, boot from a floppy into Mandrake, and copy the boot loader to a floppy for installation to the Windows partition. Only problem is...it appears that the install gives me the choice of creating LILO in the MBR, OR the Mandrake partition, OR on floppy. I went ahead and installed it to the Mandrake partition, hoping that I would be provided with a way to then get into Mandrake to finish the job. Unfortunately, at the end of the install, my only choice was to reboot. No boot floppy or CD, and when I booted, not only could I boot into Mandrake, but I couldn't boot Windows either! I got something like "L 01 01 01....". This surprised me, because I assumed that installing LILO to the Mandrake partition would leave the MBR intact.

I tried running a rescue from the first CD, thinking that I could get to lilo.conf from there. I was again surprised, discovering that there was no sign of LILO to be found (as far as I could see, anyway)--not in /etc, not in /sbin....

Next, I tried doing an upgrade from the install CDs, hoping that I'd have the chance to install the boot loader elsewhere, but it just skipped right by, and didn't give me a choice.

I tried looking through the forums and didn't see a solution for my problem. (Sorry if I missed it--if so, please point me in the right direction.)

I'm looking for the best solution, whether it involves installing LILO to the MBR or to a floppy, or something I haven't thought of. I don't care whether I use the Windows boot loader, LILO, or GRUB; I just want it to be flexible enough to handle Fedora when I add it later on, plus another distribution or two if I decide to install them.

For what it's worth, I have Windows XP installed to a primary partition, followed by an extended partition with several logical NTFS partitions and Mandrake in hda9.

Thanks VERY much in advance for any help you can give me.


Keith

Welcome!
You could boot with the xp cd>rescue console mode and do;
fixmbr
and if necessary;
fixboot

If that gets your xp to boot you could then boot to mandrakes rescue mode>Mount your partitions under /mnt> Go to Console>then do the command;
chroot /mnt

and follow this
http://www.mandrakeusers.org/index.php?showtopic=11887

This assumes that lilo did in fact, correctly get installed to the mandrake partititon.

I use grub in the /root partition and use the NTLoader to boot to grub....lilo has failed me many times, though many claim to never have problems with lilo.

How many OS's are you trying to boot? Answer that question first. If you already answered it in the first post, then don'ty worry, I'm just a bit tipsy due to a couple of blue whales and can't read straight

Hmmm... I clicked on "quote"' and nothing got copied into the message. Does that feature work? So anyway, here goes manually....



No problem! I probably didn't make it clear. At this point, it's just Windows XP and Mandrake. I've been trying to get Linspire to install, but haven't been successful so I wiped the partition. (It installed to my main PC in under 10 minutes without a single problem!) I had Fedora installed, but the first time I tried to install Mandrake it apparently tried to install into the Fedora partition! So that's gone now, too.

Once I get Mandrake working, I would like to reinstall Fedora, and later on, maybe Debian and Slackware, too; maybe even NetBSD.

So, again...The immediate goal is to get Mandrake (or Fedora) working with XP. The next goal would be to add Fedora (or Mandrake), so that I am then multi-booting with XP, Mandrake, and Fedora. But I want the setup to then lend itself to later *nix installations without too much hassle.

Thanks.

Keith

I have booted as many as 4, currently boot 3 os's with lilo. I have lilo installed to the mbr, and I copy kernels and maps to the /boot in Mandrake. I have no problems doing it this way. The only tricky part is to be sure to reference the correct root partition for each linux os in the lilo config.

I currently run XP, Mandy 10, and SuSE 9 pro.

Guess I'm not far enough along to understand how to do that yet. "I copy kernels and maps to the /boot in Mandrake" is beyond me.

Guess I'll get there eventually....

I beleive you need to make new partitions for each install. Each install can share the /swap partition and sometimes the /home partition but I don't think you can place two distros on the same /partition.

Each distro has a some what different package system and file order. So they can't work sharing the same place.

Woohoo! I have a working dual boot system. Thanks, bvc!

More later--it's 1:00 am....

Correct.



Correct.



I didn't know this.



Right.

Okay, here's my report.

The links bvc provided gave essentially the same information as "Linux In a Nutshell", and worked perfectly. I was glad to see this, because I had tried previously with Fedora and failed. (I think I must have been using the wrong partition number.) One note, bvc: I just tried changing "bootsect.lnx" to "mandrake.lnx", and it worked fine, so I should be able to add "fedora.lnx" and "debian.lnx" later.

The key to me was the "mount partitions under /mnt" and "chroot /mnt" steps in rescue mode. (Thanks for this information!) After doing that, suddenly lilo.conf was there! I'm not sure what /mnt is, but what was I seeing before when I was unable to find lilo.conf? Was I looking at the CD instead of the partition on the hard disk?

As usual, things don't go as smoothly as one would hope.

In rescue mode, I noticed an option that said something like, "Restore Windows boot partition". I thought that maybe this would save me the step of booting my XP CD and running fixmbr in rescue mode. It didn't seem to do anything, though.

Once I was in rescue console mode, I couldn't find any way to go back to make another selection from the list, so I had to reboot each time.

I was unable to mount my floppy in order to copy the LILO file. The command "mount -t msdos /dev/fd0 /mnt" gave me an error: "/dev/fd0 has wrong device number or filesystem type msdos not supported". However, one of bvc's links gave an alternative command for copying the file, "mcopy /bootsect.lnx" a:", which worked fine.

The first time I logged in, I clicked on Documentation, and KNotify crashed with a useless back trace and a message that /usr/share/doc/mandrake/en/Starter.html could not be displayed.

In the tray on the lower right, there was a "!" displayed, with a balloon message saying "Service not available". Clicking on it took me to the Mandrakeonline setup, which I still haven't successfully completed.

Samba didn't find any of my Windows partitions, so I need to work on that. Mandrake also wasn't able to get my sound card working during installation, but I think I have that working now (fingers crossed).

I was interested to see that LILO was created with SEVEN entries! I understand what "windows" and "floppy" are, and have an idea what "failsafe" might be, but don't know the details. Additionally, there are "linux", "linux-nonfb", "263-7", and "old_linux-nonfb". It appears that the first two go together, as do the last two, but I have no idea what "nonfb" means. The only difference I can see between the first two image sections is a "vga=788" in the first, which results in a graphical boot. Is this the only difference?

Booting to "linux" and doing a "kernelversion" gives me "2.6". Does that mean 2.6.0.0, or is there not a way to display the complete release number? And is this really a newer version than 2.6.3.7? Finally, why do I need a choice of booting between the two kernels?

Well, having been successful in this endeavor, I've now become confident (and probably foolhardy enough) to try doing the same with Fedora later today, and see if I can accomplish it without losing Mandrake! Guess I enjoy living dangerously. Then, later on, I may decide to do away with the Windows boot manager completely and go with LILO or Grub in the MBR. That will be another day, though....

/mnt
is where the rescue mode actually mounts the distros /fstab entries. So
/mnt = /
/mnt/etc = /etc
/mnt/usr = /usr
...etc...

failsafe= like Windows SafeMode....certain services are not run.
nonfb= no frambuffer.....plain old blk and white boot up to init 3. (I think)
I remove everything but linux and windows and of course any newer kernel entries I've installed.

multi kernels to boot are in case one doesn't boot, oh, say in the case of upgrading the kernel to a new version.

Glad it's fixed!

Here is my lilo.conf:


And here is my fstab:


I copy kernel images and initrd's to my Mandrake /boot folder. My swap is shared by all linux os's. I name the partitions according to the distro. In this scheme, my mandrake boot is the key folder. I also keep a copy for back up in my /home directory. /home/dan/fstab.bak and /home/dan/lilo.conf.bak