LILO probs........

seamus

for about the 20th time on this board. But it seems a little slow around here so.....

Got Red Hat 7.0 Unleashed for Chrimbo. Bought a new 20Gig HDD, put it in as master, and set my old 8Gig (with win98) as slave. Installed Linux on the 20gig, install went fine, LILO went on with it(I think onto the Master Boot record, but I'm not totally sure). Anyway, I boot up, select 'Windows' to boot, and...nothing. It just says 'loading Windows' and then stops. No HDD activity, nothing. Linux boots fine. Mess around with lilo.conf, and still nowt. Mess with fdisk, and at one point get a message referring to DOS 6.x and '1027Kbytes, instead of 1024' or summat. Windows will boot fine if I disconnect hda. What I think (but I'm really talking through my arse here) is that an MBR still exists on hdb (windows HDD), and so LILO get confused when faced with this.... Anyway, can anyone help? If this is some mad LILO prob, then how do I go about uninstalling LILO from the MBR and putting it in hda1, or better still, running loadlin.exe from DOS?

Thanks all.
(Oh and please, no Red Hat 7 bashing - I'm aware of it's failings . I don't care)

Typedef

umm Seamus.
You must set your win 9x as the operating system which resides on the first partition on the primary master or else you will not be able to boot it ok? Not that windowze sux or anything :rolleyes:

Just set the 8gb as the primary master, 20 as primary slave, use rescue disk or cd to boot linux and change
/etc/lilo.conf so that

image=/linux
name=Red_Head_Linux
root=/dev/hdb1

other=/dev/hda1
name=windoze

and as root run
lilo
or something similar and j00 should be ok, ok?

seamus

Cheers Typedef, that seems to be working fine...except I went and did the stupid thing....emm I set boot=/dev/hda1 instead of hda and overwrote windows's boot section. Luckily lilo saved it automatically. anyone know how to reload that info back into the HDD? Whoops

Typedef

if you have your win98 disk handy and boot of of it.
start computer with cdrom support, and get to a dos prompt
type fdisk/mbr and return, this should fix your 9x mbr foolishness or sumthin.

boot linux with rescue disk change the /etc/lilo.conf to say hda instead of hda1
save
lilo
and j00 should be ok, ok?

seamus

gah, I'm a feckin eejit. Anyway live and learn. I managed to restore the old windoze boot record, but now LILO only gets as far as LI when I'm loading windoze, so I'll have to search for the old CD... Cheers again typedef. I can see this this OS is gonna be lots of fun

phaxx

LILO == pants.

Just my opinion, don't hurt me typedef.. *cowers*

A far better bootloader is the FreeBSD one. So far, I think I've mentioned it four or five times on this board...

Anyway, download these:


ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/tools/bootinst.exe

ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/tools/boot.bin

Drag boot.bin onto bootinst.exe, and that's it. End of story, no configuration needed.

If windows isn't working, do what typedef said and boot from a bootdisk, run fdisk /mbr, then you should be able to get back into windows to do that, otherwise, make a bootdisk on another box, put those two files on it and run bootinst boot.bin

Case closed.

Typedef

#hmm seamus this might help
# LILO configuration file
# generated by 'liloconfig'
#
# Start LILO global section
lba32 # Allow booting past 1024th cylinder with a recent BIOS
boot = /dev/hda
#compact # faster, but won't work on all systems.
prompt
# VESA framebuffer console @ 1024x768x64k
#vga = 791
# Normal VGA console
# vga = normal
# VESA framebuffer console @ 1024x768x64k
# vga=791

image = /kernel
root = /dev/hda6
label = SlackDVD
vga=791
append="video=tdfx:1024x768-32@62"
read-only # Non-UMSDOS filesystems should be mounted read-only for checking

#other=/dev/hda7
#label=gnu_hurd

other=/dev/hda9
label = Debian

other = /dev/hda1
label = Win2k
table = /dev/hda

other = /dev/hdb3
label = FreeBSD

other = /dev/hdb1
label = Solaris

other=/dev/hdb4
label=AtheOS

image=/kernel
root=/dev/hda6
label=SlackCDRW
append="hdc=ide-scsi hdd=ide-scsi video=tdfx:1024x768-32@64"
read-only

moist

The FreeBSD boot manager is pretty decent.
However I have always found it handy to to have GAG on a floppy.
Its a (kinda ugly ) graphical thingumy which can be easilly configured
without having to boot into any OS.
Then you can save that configuration on to the floppy or save GAG and the config to the MBR
if you like.

The homepage is
raster.cibermillennium.com/gageng.htm
but that seems to be down at the moment,
you can also get it from www.gnu.org/directory/gag.html

seamus

Cheers all, got it sorted, using LILO. NOw, where to get a decent boot screen instead of that Red Hat one.........