[lug] Problem with LILO & WIn 2k

[John Karns]

On Mon, 5 Nov 2001, Sean Reifschneider said:

> Did you create a "/boot" partition that was within the first 1024 cylinders
> of the disc (as reported by fdisk)?  Newer lilo and grub configurations can
> handle it, so maybe if you tried Mandrake 8.2 it would Just Work.  Maybe
> not though...  Worst case, make a boot floppy or use "loadlin" to load the
> kernel after you boot Windows (if you can't re-arrange it to make the /boot
> be within the first 1024 cyls).  I think grub can get around this though.

It's been a while since I've tried it (back in the days of W95 I think),
but I used to experience some flakiness if I called lilo either directly
from the MSW GUI or after exiting the GUI to "MS DOG only mode" - i.e.,
Linux was somewhat unstable and would lock up after a period of time.  I
presumed that loadlin had failed to unhook some hooked irq's or some such
that himem.sys or one of the other tsr-like DOS components had modified
during the MSW / DOS boot process.  Not sure about current versions of
loadlin in this regard.  My work around was to modify msdos.sys in MSW 9x
to force the DOS boot menu, and boot to command mode, avoiding the GUI
altogether.  Then either calling loadlin from the DOS boot menu via an
entry, or creating a DOS batch file to boot Linux via loadlin with any
desired parameters.

I believe that there is also an alternative to loadlin for booting Linux
from MSW.  Unfortunately, I can't remember the name of the pkg at the
moment, nor do I know if it offers an improvement to loadlin in this
regard.

----------------------------------------------------------------
John Karns                                        jkarns at csd.net