Re: Linux 7.2 booting problem
From: Frank Winans (fwinans_at_airmail.net)
Date: 12/06/03
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Date: Sat, 6 Dec 2003 16:47:58 -0600
"Werner" wrote
> I had to install Linux 7.2 due to it being the one supported by Borland
> Kylix.
>
> My problem is as follows:
> I have two separate disks in my PC and decided not to go with a dual boot
> but to simply change the boot disk in the BIOS whenever I want to run Win2K
> or Linux.
>
> I installed Linux on the slave drive. I created a boot floppy disk during
> the first installation.
>
> When I try to boot off the Linux disk drive I only get the word GRUB at the
> top of the screen and that is all. Booting using the floppy and everything
> is fine.
>
> I then re-installed Linux and used LILO as Bootloader and did not create a
> boot floppy. Booting off the slave disk only shows the letters LI at top of
> screen and nothing else happens. Again system is happy if I reboot and use
> the floppy drive.
If I've got this right, you have a very nice bios that lets you decide to boot off the
slave hard disk of primary ide cable, but doing so doesn't let either LILO or
grub do a happy bootup if no floppy is inserted.
I'll guess that when you did both your linux installs you'd left the bios set to boot
off the master disk of that primary ide cable,
or more precisely to boot off cdrom then master hd if no cd present.
Theory; whenever your bios resorts to booting from hard disk instead of
floppy or cdrom, if you've told it to boot from the slave instead of the master,
it not only boots from it, but it exchanges their ids in the 'disks present' list it
provides to bootup software. So your linux boot floppy is calibrated ok,
internally it knows to go use /dev/hdb* partitions for everything, but when you
boot from the slave hard disk the bios gets LILO or grub started but they're
also trying to use /dev/hdb* partitions which is now wrong -- windows is hdb
and linux is on /dev/hda* partitions.
If that's what is going wrong, I suppose you could make alternate boot sections
in grub or LILO that let you try booting to /dev/hda* partitions -- really read the
docs though and don't let grub or LILO validate your new sections since the
hardware won't be like that yet. Perhaps you could make another floppy to
boot from instead, and hack _it_ to assume swapped hard disks...
Another way to deal with this is always boot windows but reboot to command
prompt only and launch a chainloader {loadlin?} to bring up linux.
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