Newbie Q about booting

From: Bill Holt (bill_at_itsound.demon.co.uk)
Date: 10/01/04 

Date: Fri, 1 Oct 2004 12:26:15 +0100

I'm a bit embarrassed to be asking what are no doubt basic questions,
but hope I can get some more guidance.

I'm starting again with a small machine which has the ability to boot
from a 32meg Disk-On-Chip and has no floppy. At the moment the DOC has a
password-protected NT4 that is useless. I can plug in a CD drive on
dangling wires for the initial installs, but it's very awkward and has
to be done away from the network for space (and safety!) reasons.
I'm sticking with Slackware 10 because it seems to require that I
understand (vaguely) what I'm doing.
I want to have some sort of dual-boot with Windows because that's where
I came from and find it useful to be able to drop back into with my
workgroup networking. Things keep saying "Boot from a DOS floppy", so I
guess that real DOS somewhere would be useful.
The system can access the internet and the network from W2k and
Slackware and my usb keychain drive works in both OS's. I have a usb
floppy, but the bios doesn't support usb booting.

I have read that GRUB includes an option to run from a DOC. I have so
far only used LILO with slackware.

I'm trying to do what I've done in the past, namely install W2k then
install Slackware and allow that to configure LILO to give the dual
boot.

I find that I don't understand what a boot partition actually is. I
start with a 10 gig drive. If I put a 100meg FAT partition on there
first followed by a 2 gig partition and try to install W2k to the
latter, it fails to start. Should I be using the Slackware install CD to
fdisk the drive first before installing W2k and if so how should I
approach the partitioning?

I think I want to end up with:
2 gigs for W2k
4 gigs for Slackware10
a small DOS FAT partition to look like a DOS floppy ???
an area to use to build various images to offer up to the DOC as I try
to make it a viable boot system
possibly another area to use to try different Linux builds.
Can I make a small boot area where I can place GRUB ( and LILO??) to
give me a sort of stable launch pad for the various OS's?

My eventual aim is to get a few of these machines into a state that I
can use as general-purpose controllers, hopefully just using the DOC and
a small usb flash drive.

Sorry for all the questions. 

-- 
Bill Holt

Relevant Pages

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