Asa Rossoff wrote:
When I boot, I select Win ME in LiLo, then I get a boot failure message (something along the lines of invalid boot disk, please replace and hit any key to retry- looks like it's BIOS initiated.)
Swop the drives over, and it will boot into ME fine, so the OS is intact etc.
Any Ideas?? or am I just hoping for too much? :-(
JRH
Windows expects to boot from the first drive in the system (which it will always call C:). I believe there are ways to trick it into booting from other drives. I haven't tried it. Smart Boot Manager can do this by (I think) having the bios report the drives in a swapped fashion. SBM is at http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/
Right as well as wrong.
First of all, the Bios always searches the first IDE drive for the boot-sector and simple executes it and whatever bootmanager is on there, it will do the rest.
Unless there is an option in the Bios to change bootpriority for IDE drives, you won't be able to change this fact.
I understand that. Smart Boot Manager can be installed to the boot sector of the real first drive, and when you select a Windows/Dos partition on the Second drive, it can be configurered to make Win/Dos think that the second drive is 1st, and the first drive is 2nd.
SBM is not a kernel loader, so you still need a kernel loader for linux (I think it has to be installed on a supersector or something like that if you have SBM on track 0... there are instructions with SBM. It could also go on the boot sector of the second hardddrive.)
Second, Windows boots from the first boot-device, but it can be configured to have it's OS on another drive by altering the MSDOS.INI and in case of WinNT 4.x, 5.x you can alter the BOOT.INI to set the drive and startup-path where the os is stored.
If your bootmanager on the primary IDE drive allows you to boot from the second drive, you can install all of the Windows data on there but in the win9x/ME cases you for sure have to modify the system settings to make it boot properly.
I didn't realize Win98 and Me had a similar boot config file to NT/XP. It looks like it's actually msdos.sys on Win98 at least, rather than msdos.ini.
Since he is running both 98 and Me, on seperate drives and partitions, and using Lilo to select them (currently), in theory he could just edit the msdos.ini (or msdos.sys) file on his WinMe partition (second drive) to indicate that the OS is on drive D: -- it might work. BUT, he would have to reinstall WinMe while the drive is recognized as D: (if the WinMe installer allows it) or do some major registry, shortcut and config file hacking.
IMHO:Ditch WinME, it's really not worth the trouble, either install '98SE or XP, but Win'98 is currently less vulnerable to virusses these days as most viruses dedicates themselves to NT5.x exploites (XP/2000/2003).
Asa
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