To Whom It May Concern:
I recently installed Red Hat Linux 7.3 as an upgrade to Red Hat
Linux 7.0 and because of familiarity with the problems LILO had
with Windows NT (particularly with Windows-2000 Pro) and no
experience with GRUB put the GRUB boot loader over on /dev/hdb1
[ (hd1, 0) in GRUB parlance] and continued to use BootMagic on
the first drive with Windows 98-SE. Windows 98-SE developed
problems and so I replaced it with Windows-2000 Pro only to
realize that I could no longer boot to Linux, and when I tried
to install BootMagic I was informed it could only live on a
FAT16 or FAT32 file system. Wonderful. So I carved off a tiny
portion on the front of the first drive and gave it a FAT32
file system that I installed BootMagic on. It now dual boots,
but lo and behold I found that the second choice of GRUB which
was Windows 98-SE was now Windows-NT and despite the fact that
the partition had moved up slightly from the base to make room
for the FAT32 file system that it would boot. But I can NOT go
into BootMagic and reconfigure it so that Linux was my first
choice. Here is what I have:
Linux GRUB
Partition Partition File System Mount Point
========= ========= =========== ===========
/dev/hda (hd0) MBR (home of BootMagic)
/dev/hda1 (hd0, 0) NTFS F:
/dev/hda2 (hd0, 1) FAT32 G:
--------- --------- ----------- -----------
/dev/hdb1 (hd1, 0) ext3 / (home of GRUB)
/dev/hdb2 (hd1, 1) Linux SWAP
/dev/hdb3 (hd1, 2) ext3 /var
/dev/hdb4 (hd1, 3) EXTENDED
/dev/hdb5 (hd1, 4) ext3 /usr
...
/dev/hdb10 (hd1, 9) FAT32 C:
Please do not ask me why Windows-2000 installed itself as
drive F:! My only thoughts about this are that when I used
Partition Magic to blow away drive C: and make an NTFS on
it (which Windows-2000 didn't even recognize as its native
file system), it had already mapped the CD drives as D: and
E: and F: was the next available drive letter. Even though
drive G: is the second partition on the first drive, it is
actually the first portion of the drive after the MBR area.
Now since I can't configure BootMagic anyway, what I am
proposing to do is to remove it. Here is how I propose
to go about doing it.
[1] Remove BootMagic, unfortunately this doesn't help
completely because I can't turn the system off or it would
be unbootable because I can't fire it up and reconfigure
things. Yes, I went and looked at the configuration file
and can't make heads or tails out of it. I assume an
fdisk /mbr should make it bootable to only Windows 2000
again but I wouldn't know. I may have to contact
PowerQuest before doing this.
[2] (Optional) Reinstall BootMagic. At least this way I can
at install time make it deactivate itself which will cause
Windows 2000 to boot again. Then I can remove it.
[3] In Partition Magic, delete the second partition and let
the NTFS have the whole disk again. Yes, it can actually
move things around with the 2000 version of Partition
Magic. It really is magic.
[4] Now, I have a system that will boot only to Windows-2000,
unless I want to use the bootable floppy to boot to Linux.
So, I will boot to Linux with it (yes I will make sure
this works before I even start all of this). Now, I will
dd the first portion of the zeroth drive in case putting
GRUB there mucks things up.
[5] Now, I have to migrate GRUB from living on (hd1, 0) to
(hd0, 0), or more specifically to the MBR on the first
drive. This is where I get stuck. I have read your docs
and other people's docs until I am turning blue and I
still can't figure out how to do it. I can give you my
/boot/grub/menu.conf file if that helps any. In other
words, this is the place I need help. If you can point
out a site to me that shows me how to do this I would
appreciate it.
Thanks
David A Harvey
PS I would be willing to setup a web site for answers to
questions like this except I am afraid the school here
would not like all the hits they get. So far I haven't
found any place out on the web that answers the problem
I have. I AM CONVINCED IT IS SOLVABLE!
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