On Mon, 2004-08-30 at 14:26, JRH wrote: > Hi all, > > Bit of a good one this! > > I have 2 HDD's in my machine, and I want to boot from both Drives. > > My main drive (/dev/hdc) is where LiLo is installed. > > On my main drive, I have: hdc1: Windows 98SE, hdc5: /root, hdc7: /usr, hdc8: > /home. > > The second drive, contains Windows ME (dont ask!!), and DiskDrake sees it as > /dev/hda, and LiLo sees it as hda1. > > In theory, all looks like it should work. But it dont! > > 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
First some basics: There is a current mythology running around these days that Winblows (be it me or xp or 98 or whatever) must have a partition at the beginning of the drive. This is patently false and I want to debunk this old wives tale right now, I'm tired of seeing it. Second, the prime real estate for any drive is at the beginning of the drive, not the end. If a Linux installation is put at the end then you are most likely depriving your MDK of some prime real estate. Third, most bioses these days allow you to choose which drive you boot from. The installation trick with me, XP, or whatever is to boot your MDK installation disk #1 into it's install routine, and get the installation program to the point where you see the partition layouts at the install screen. I know about the rescue disk option but I've done extensive work both ways, and it turns out that for low level maintenance, an install boot is handier than a rescue disk boot. An MDK install boot to the partitioning step makes a better rescue disk than the rescue disk. Once you see that screen, you do ctrl-alt-f2 and that puts you in a console screen, with all filesystem modules loaded that you need for that box. After you do that, use fdisk to set up all your partitons, including the Windows one. What I do is allocate an extended partition first, the size I want the linux install to be. It would look like this: [EMAIL PROTECTED] elx]# fdisk -l /dev/sda Disk /dev/sda: 160.2 GB, 160226334720 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19478 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 1 4462 35840983+ 85 Linux extended /dev/sda5 1 6 48132 83 Linux /dev/sda6 7 93 698796 83 Linux /dev/sda7 94 160 538146 82 Linux swap /dev/sda8 161 307 1180746 83 Linux /dev/sda9 308 902 4779306 83 Linux /dev/sda10 903 4462 28595668+ 83 Linux /dev/sda2 * 4463 7961 28113718+ 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda3 7962 19478 92510302+ c Win95 FAT32 (LBA) sda5 = boot sda6 = root sda7 = swap sda8 = tmp sda9 = usr sda10 = var Boot-root are "special" cases, don't take up much room, and therefore have a minimal impact on the prime real estate at the drive spindle; and boot speed is my main reason for putting them there, besides there being an old under-the-1024 cylinder OS boot rule that I still subconsiously respect for some reason. Swap is first in line to take advantage of spindle real estate; followed by /tmp. You definitely want swap to have the best seat in the house, with /tmp following a close second. Generally you want to put partitions that have the shortest file lifetimes closer to the spindle and partitions that have files with the longest file lifetimes out towards the edge of the platter. /usr has long file lifetimes and thus as you see above is an exception to the latter speed rule, but I put it where it is for reasons of program load speed. There's always an exception to the rule. ;) Note that I have given NTFS and Win98 primary partitions and I have put Linux inside a type 85. The reason for that is that Winblows is less likely to screw with the tables of a non-dos partition that it does not understand, and a type 85 has historically fallen within that category. Note also that I have put these partitions at the end of the drive; that is because they simply have the lowest priority. ;) Note also that there is no primary partition for Linux. This is simply because of symmetry and also because of the fact that Linux doesn't need one. MDK can operate completely within an extended partition shell with no problem and it is preferable to do it this way for many reasons. Retain your primary partition entries (which are very limited in number) for dumber stupider OS's like XP, ME, or 98se. Now the trick. After partitioning layout is done you start your winblows installation; do not install MDK. You tell your bios to boot from the winblows drive after you have done all your partitioning setup with fdisk. This is the important step. After you save your bios setup to do this, you start your Winblows installation. Sometimes you can get better results if you format a fat32 partition first at a dos command line instead of letting an install routine do that. Install XP, 98 whatever to the drive you have set to be boot; make sure winblows is working ok and stable. Then after that, reboot and set the bios to boot your Linux drive. Boot the MDK cd and install MDK to the partitions you have already set up. MDK will then recognize your Win partitions and set up the boot files accordingly, in my case most of the time painlessly. Knock on wood. Don't forget to set the bios back to the Linux drive as the boot drive, that's the important step. Once you get the boot sequence set up, mdk installed, and it's controlled by Lilo, it's better not to mess with the bios boot routines anymore. In some instances, I have actually seen 98se barf when I was messing around with bios boot settings, as it tried to reconfigure itself to understand the changed hard drive bios assignments. XP is even more touchy about boot settings. So don't do that. One more thing you may notice in the Linux partition layout above that there is no home partition. The reason for that is in my file lifetime analysis I have found that the files in /home partition and /var partition have a highly similar rate of change; therefore in all installs I symlink /home to /var/home. The rule is to group files with similar rates of change together in the same partition containers whenever possible. Among other things this eliminates another partition divide and allows you to consolidate your /home and /var disk resources in one, giving you much more space flexibility. The more partitions you have the less flexible your space usability becomes. Partition classification by file rates of change also reduces the chances of filesystem corruption overall by utilizing separation of filesystems by destructive risk. The higher the rate of change of a set of files the higher the probability of filesystem faux pas. Hence for example one of the historical reasons behind a seperate /tmp partition. LX
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