[CLUE-Tech] Re: Newbie dual-booting XP and Linux problems

[Dave Anselmi]

Kenneth Courville wrote:

> Thanks for the responses.  Ed, and anyone else interested, here is my
> lilo.conf...please note the hardware/software changes below, too:

I would suggest that you leave the hardware alone and don't reinstall
anything.  You will learn more by finding and fixing the problem rather than
rearranging things until you hit on a workable combination.

> prompt
> timeout=50
> default=Windows XP Pro
> boot=/dev/hda
> map=/boot/map
> install=/boot/boot.b
> message=/boot/message
> lba32
>
> image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.7-10
>     label=linux 7.2
>     initrd=/boot/initrd-2.4.7-10.img
>     read-only
>     root=/dev/hdb2
>     append="hdd=ide-scsi"
>
> other=/dev/hda1
>     optional
>     label=Windows XP Pro

I don't see anything particularly wrong with this conf, though it doesn't
seem to provide enough info to boot XP.  As I said, the docs are bad about
that so maybe it does work.  Here is what I use, and this does work:

# other operating systems:
other=/dev/hda1
 label="Windows XP"
 loader=/boot/os2_d.b
 table=/dev/hda

[...]

> When executing LILO after booting off the floppy, it now give a "boot is
> not on the first drive, syntax error near line 3" (not exact message),
> which wasn't happening before I re-installed.

When you rearranged your drives, did you change the jumpers to tell them
which is master and which slave?  You'll also want to make sure that your
filesystem matches your lilo.conf, not something the boot floppy set up.  In
other words, /dev/hdb2 is your root partition, /dev/hdb1 is mounted as
/boot, and so on.  If all of that is correct, the exact error message might
help.

You can also try changing your lilo.conf to point the boot line at your
floppy drive.  Write the boot sector there and see if you can boot both
Linux and XP from it (it will still use the hard drives for everything
except the boot sector).  That should get you past the "not first drive"
error.


> Also, during this re-install, I tried to let LILO be the boot manager. I
> selected to install LILO to the MBR...after turning off the boot-sector
> protection in the BIOS (pretty sure that was one of the problems
> before).  Then when booting, I would only get "L", then a bunch of
> "02"s.

Here is a link to help you understand the error messages.  Again, I think it
is more likely that your drive jumpers are wrong than your lilo.conf.

http://sdb.suse.de/sdb/en/html/kgw_lilo_errmsg.html

Perhaps one day I will try grub, and then I'll tell everyone to use it,
too.  I'm in no hurry because lilo and I get along.  If you care to read the
docs and figure out how to install it, and don't have any reason to use lilo
instead, then you might try switching.  I don't recommend reinstalling Linux
just to switch to grub though.  I think learning how to do it from where you
are will serve you better in the long run.

Dave