Guest One Salient Oversight Posted June 29, 2004 Report Share Posted June 29, 2004 I'm trying to learn how to dual boot. I think my problem is that I have Mandrake on one Hard drive and Windows on another. I don't want to have them on the same drive together (I want to be able to take my windows HDD out and use it on other PCs). I've gone into Mandrake Control Centre and I've put an option into Lilo called "Windows 98" which, according to what the control panel says, should boot up on hdb1. Well it doesn't work. I opened the box, turned the Windows slave into Master, disconnected the Mandrake Master, re-jigged the Bios to identify a new master, and windows boots up fine. Then when I turn the windows HDD back into a slave, reconnect the Mandrake master, Lilo doesn't seem to be able to boot windows at all. I changed the relevant part of lilo.conf from hdb1 to just hdb. That didn't work. I've checked all the little connectors - there's nothing wrong with the Hard Drives. Both work fine. I can also access the windows slave when I'm using Mandrake - it is on my desktop as "Hard Disc" and is file:/mnt/hd. When I use DiskDrake, it comes up as hdb. But the filesystem on hdb is all "Grey" ie it is considered "other" rather than the Blue "Windows" I think it should look like (this is as I view it graphically - I've gone into Mandrake Control Centre -> Mount Points -> Partitions). There is nothing on hdb that I can't reinstall but it would be a pain to reinstall windows all over again. Is there an easy solution to all this? Thanks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kieth Posted June 29, 2004 Report Share Posted June 29, 2004 Put the settings on the hard drives like they were when you installed linux. Then insert your Mandrake disk 1, go into 'rescue', and have it re-install your boot loader. When you installed Mandrake, it should have automatically recognized Win98. Then when you re-booted, it would give you a choose as to which OS you wanted to inter into. After you installed, what happened? Kieth Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ixthusdan Posted June 29, 2004 Report Share Posted June 29, 2004 Dual, triple, and quadruple booting does not require any changed in your computer bios. Now, windex does want to be first postion on the boot device, and linux does not care where it is. It is also not necessary to have seperate drives, and mulitple drives is ok too. So, I think you are installing linux and then removing the windex drive. When you do this, you should edit your /etc/lilo.conf file and your /etc/fstab to remove the windex drive enteries. As long as the ide location remians the same, linux will not care. If you change ide locations, then you will need to edit the afore mentioned files. Windex is not booting because it is not primary on the boot device. Also you must be aware of the linux naming convention: hda is ide primary master, hdb is ide primary slave. hdc is ide secondary master, and hdd is ide secondary slave. The numbers, hda1, refer to partition 1 on the ide primary master. You may have bungled the identification process! B) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted June 29, 2004 Report Share Posted June 29, 2004 it can be done...I've done it. Win98 just needs to think it's the first pri partition on hda. I used grub when I did it and have no idea what lilo does for mapping drives. In grub it's map (hd0,0) (hd1,0) map (hd1,0) (hd0,0) that tells grub to switch hda1 to hdb1 and hdb1 to hda1 and yes you'll have to edit the bootloader config and fstab from rescue mode. After doing this a couple of times you get to where you can edit the files before you reboot to make the switch. B) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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