> Er, installing LILO to /dev/hdd wouldn't do much, and still wouldn't
> let you boot Linux.
I wondered about that, and was just following instructions, but for the wrong
drive. If I had properly put the mbr on the /dev/hdd drive, then I'd be
asking different questions. :-)
>
> Instead, you want to install LILO at the beginning of your Linux /
> (or /boot) partition, /dev/hdd# (1? 2?). And then use a 3rd party
> boot manager like XOSL (http://www.xosl.org) to select which
> partition(s) to boot for each.
Right. I think I have the LILO thing down, a little, that's the inexperience
I was talking about. At this point, I still don't know how Windows knows to
boot from /dev/hda. I am aware that that I put the mbr into /dev/hda, not
/dev/hdd.
> Why can't you boot into Linux if you install LILO into the MBR?
And thus my question. ;-) I don't know enough about how Windows/Linux boots.
I guess I need to configure the BIOS to look for /dev/hdd first to see where
to boot from? Or from somewhere else?
> And from there, why can't you setup LILO to boot both Linux and
> Windows???
I could, if I knew what I was doing in this regard...Actually, I'll get to
that in due course.
> As far as "experience," this is a pure _partitioning_ issue and not
> so much a Linux one. In fact, if Windows was as flexible with
> booting as Linux was, you wouldn't have any issues.
True. The majority of my experience with Linux is on the Mac (both m68k and
PowerPC), which have very different ideas about booting, and partitioning.
PowerPC, for instance, requires an 800K boot sector at the beginning of the
disk, because otherwise the firmware will re-determine what to boot from.
(Apple's had a hand in this.) I've never played with cfdisk, or logical vs.
primary partitions....I don't know what the bootable flag does, exactly,
either....ah, the joys of learning. :-)
> Boot a Windows floppy and issue "fdisk /mbr". Of course, you now
> prevent Linux from booting.
But at least I'll be back to asking intelligent questions, rather than trying
to fix dumb mistakes.
> If you want to boot multiple OSes, and really don't like LILO, try
> XOSL (http://www.xosl.org). But be sure to re-install LILO at the
> beginning of the Linux / (or /boot) partition.
>
> -- TheBS
Thanks for this. I don't like LILO, though I may get used to it for now,
because it's "popular" and ubiquitous. Then I'll go the more elegant route,
like you suggest. Or, I'll try GRUB.
Russell
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Fri Aug 01 2014 - 15:19:19 EDT