[lug] Newbie Needs Help on Installation

[Wayde Allen]

On Thu, 27 Jan 2000, Calvin Dodge wrote:

> Lilo really needs to have the boot partition on the primary hard drive (the
> rest of Linux can reside on the slave drive).

That isn't really true is it?  Perhaps this is an IDE restriction?

The only restriction I know of is that the
root (or boot) partition needs to reside below 1024 cylinders.  For a
second disk this would almost be a given since the root partition would
start basically at the beginning.

>  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?

Unless as I mentioned above, unless there is something unique to the IDE
drives, LILO really only needs access to the master boot record on the
bootable drive.  This is reserved disk space, and you wouldn't need to
repartition the drive.  LILO *does* need to know where to find the
bootable images of both Windows and Linux however.  If the installation
program didn't set this correctly you'd need to use a boot floppy to start
the Linux program, edit /etc/lilo.conf, and then run lilo in order to
correctly over write the master boot record.

> 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).

Yes, both of these methods would work, and may in fact be necessary to
recover the system from its current state.  My guess based on the current
info is that the master boot record is corrupted, and will need to be
rewritten, either by lilo or by fdisk /mbr (I think you have to have an
older version of fdisk for the /mbr switch to work though.).


- Wayde
  (wallen at boulder.nist.gov)