Guest bonesinger Posted October 20, 2005 Report Share Posted October 20, 2005 About two months ago, I successfully installed Mandriva 10.1 on the third hard drive on a dual boot system with Win XP, successfully installed Lilo to the /boot partition, and successfully booted into it using Gag on a floppy without having to modify the XP bootloader. Unfortunately, a bad hard drive trashed the linux installation. So I downloaded and burned the free Mandriva 2006 three CDR set, naively assuming that I could use the same technique to boot it. Unfortunately, it offered to use GRUB instead of Lilo, and I wrongly assumed that GRUB would work with the Gag floppy. I would very much appreciate some advice on how to proceed from here. 1. Would it be easier for me to install and immediately upgrade a working Mandriva 10.1 installation to Mandriva 2006 or should I take the appropriate steps to install Lilo into the /boot partition of the Mandriva 2006 and then use Gag to boot it as before? 2. If the answer is the latter action, how and where in the Mandriva 2006 installation can I get to a command prompt, log on as root, and install the Lilo into the /boot partition? 3. If the best answer is to upgrade, will I have to reinstall Lilo again during the Mandriva 2006 upgrade process? 4. Is there any way for me to rescue the existing Mandriva 2006 installation using the installation CD? Please reply to this thread at this forum and also contact me directly by email after removing the x's and y's from my email address. Paul byoxneysinxgexr7@earthylink.next Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
polemicz Posted October 20, 2005 Report Share Posted October 20, 2005 I'm not clear why you want to use Gag. Most people who have set up dual boots have had no problems replacing the Windows bootloader. You can do a clean install of 2006 and install either Grub or Lilo on either the MBR or the Linux root partition. You can handle this at the end of the installation in the summary section (configure bootloader). Hope this helps and welcome to the board. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shadowchaser Posted October 20, 2005 Report Share Posted October 20, 2005 (edited) I agree with polemicz, but if you don't want to replace your current MBR you could make boot from a floppy, Mandriva will give you a choice. hope it helps. Edited October 20, 2005 by Shadowchaser Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AussieJohn Posted October 20, 2005 Report Share Posted October 20, 2005 Shove in your No.1 installation CDROM and do a pretend upgrade. Follow it through until it gets to the boot settings. Select Grub (easiest to deal with) and where it asks where to install the bootloader, select fd0 which is the floppy drive. Make sure you have a blank formatted floppy disc in the drive before pressing the OK. With this floppy you will be able to select your Mandriva, as well as your Windows, without taking the floppy out each time you want to swap OSs. Cheers. John. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest bonesinger Posted October 21, 2005 Report Share Posted October 21, 2005 Thank you all for your helpful suggestions. I am particularly grateful to John and Shadowchaser for accepting my reluctance to replace the Windows XP bootloader and reminding me that the GRUB bootloader could be saved to a floppy and used to boot either Windows or Linux. I believe I actually tried to save GRUB on a floppy during the install, but because I had only vfat formatted floppies, it didn't work. As soon as I can make a couple of linux formatted floppies using Windows, I will either try John's pretend upgrade or just start over again after first securely deleting the contents of all the linux partitions using Partition Magic. And because of your help, I am confident that I shall succeed this time. Sincerely, Paul Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AussieJohn Posted October 21, 2005 Report Share Posted October 21, 2005 I only use vfat formatted floppys. If it doesn't work then the floppy is faulty (regardless of whether it seems to work in windows.) or the tab has been accidently set to read only. I generally use a new floppy out off the box first off and then only use that floppy for future boot purposes without reformatting. Cheers. John. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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