[lug] Newbie Needs Help on Installation

[Calvin Dodge]

clara cantorna wrote:
> 
> My problem is this.  My primary hard drive (C:) runs Windows 98.  I
> installed Linux on the other hard drive without any problems.  However,
> after the installation is completed and the system re-boots itself, it won't
> load.  I keep getting  1s and 0s when the system reboots.

Lilo really needs to have the boot partition on the primary hard drive (the
rest of Linux can reside on the slave drive).  You have three options here:

1) Make a small (15 megs or so) boot partition on your primary drive.  You'll
need to shrink your Windows partition with "fips", which comes with Red Hat
(and presumably other distributions). FWIW, fips has worked well for me every
time EXCEPT once - when I tried it on a 17 gig hard drive (it shrank the
partition - and destroyed the Win98 directory structure).  How large is your
primary hard drive?

2) Use the "loadlin" method of booting to Linux. This involves putting
"loadlin" and a copy of the Linux kernel on your Windows partition, then
running loadlin with the appropriate kernel and Linux root partition
information (this can be done with a multi-boot CONFIG.SYS file, so you can
easily choose which mode you want during startup).

3) Use a Linux emergency boot floppy (assuming you created one during the
initial install).

Calvin

-- 
Calvin Dodge
Certified Linux Bigot
http://www.caldodge.fpcc.net