Dual Booting RH 8 with Grub and Windows '98 - drive letters changing
From: Klytu (jazzyjeff34_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 03/18/04
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Date: 17 Mar 2004 19:06:27 -0800
I wasn't sure of the right newsgroup to post this in, but you folks
seem to be a friendly, knowledgeable group so I thought I'd take a
shot here!
My setup has two Western Digital drives - one is connected to the
motherboard (ancient Award BIOS 4.51) and the other to a SIIG Ultra
ATA/133 PCI controller. I have RedHat Linux 8 and GRUB installed on
the 8 GB drive connected to the motherboard; Windows 98 is on the
faster 20 GB drive connected to the controller card.
Originally, I had the 20 GB Windows drive partitioned with one primary
partion for Windows 98 and one extended partition containing three
logical partitions. This setup caused two weird problems that appeared
only when I booted into Windows 98 from GRUB. The first problem was
that the system would hang for about 2-3 minutes before beginning to
boot Windows from the second drive. The second was that, in the middle
of loading, Windows would choke when it hit the extended partition and
indicate that it was an "invalid media type - abort retry fail? " If I
abort or fail, Windows finished loading but then I would end up with
an extra drive letter appearing in Windows Explorer. That drive letter
turned out to be the extended partition and could not be accessed (as
it shouldn't, but it should appear as an extra drive). The logical
partitions would then appear in order, but now the letters of all the
drives are bumped up because of the "extra" drive. The data was all
there and intact, but now drive references are messed up for installed
software. When I would boot Windows directly (by having the BIOS boot
from the controller card first) the problem did not occur; there was
no extra drive and Windows would display all the drives properly.
After much internet research and trial and error, I worked around the
situation by not using any extended or logical FAT32 partitions; I
made all FAT32 partitions primary partitions. After that the system
does not hang when GRUB loads Windows 98 and all drives appear with
the proper letters without any "extras". This situation is not ideal
as I had originally planned to use more than four partitions and only
four primary partitions are allowed per drive; but I can live with
it for a while and everything works.
My question after all this rambling is WHY did the system hang and WHY
did the extra drive letter appear when loading Windows from GRUB when
I used an extended FAT32 partition? If anyone can give any insight
into what's going on here or just took the time to read through all
this, believe me I appreciate it! If this post is way off topic for
this group, I would appreciate any direction as to where I might get
some help. Thanks in advance!
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