Re: [SLUG] dual boot question

From: Ian C. Blenke (icblenke@nks.net)
Date: Tue Nov 26 2002 - 18:36:01 EST


On Tuesday 26 November 2002 15:37, Mikes work account wrote:
> I have a gateway and two hard drives. Each will boot correctly. One is
> RH 8.0 and the other '98. How do I set up the dual boot with two drives
> already with systems on them?

Smitty offered a hardware solution. Those have never thrilled me.
The software solution is relatively simple.

1. Make a RH8.0 boot floppy.
  - write down your "root" filesystem (like /dev/hda3)

2.Hook up your '98 drive as your primary master. Make sure you can boot from
it.

3. Hook up your RH8.0 drive as a secondary drive, preferably as the secondary
master.

4. Boot to the RH8.0 boot floppy, with a "root=/dev/hdc3" parameter (or merely
replace "hda" with the appropriate block device for your Linux drive). Also,
use the "single" or "S" option to boot single user, or if you can't seem to
login or have forgotten the root password, use "init=/bin/bash" to get a root
shell.

5. Once you have a shell, edit your /etc/fstab and replace all occurances of
"hda" with the appropriate new block device for your Linux drive).

6. Next, edit your /etc/lilo.conf to boot to "other=dos" on /dev/hda and then
re-run lilo. Alternatively, you can install grub or your preferred boot
manager (loadlin works from a DOS menu in a pinch).
You can also make a backup of your MBR (first 512 bytes) on the primary drive
if you want to undo lilo/grub later and make win98 boot as it did previously.

7. Reboot your system. If you edited your /etc/fstab correctly, the system
will boot. If not, don't worry, merely reboot with the floppy or get a
"lilo:" (or "grub>") prompt and boot your kernel with the same trick used in
step 4. Re-edit /etc/fstab and try again.

The keys here are editing your /etc/fstab appropriately, and installing a
bootloader on your primary master drive (or whatever drive you have your BIOS
set to boot from).

Hope this clears things up a bit.

-- 
- Ian C. Blenke <icblenke@nks.net>

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