One of my friends here in BYU's CS department uses Windows all the time, but
wants to start using Linux. Both times he has tried to install Linux on his
home machine, it has given him problems because of his strange hardware. He
came to me for help, but it was out of my league. I was wondering if anyone
on the list could point us toward a solution.
He runs a 450MHz Pentium III with 256 MG RAM, 2 western digital hard drives
(a 20GB primary master, and a 60 GB primary slave), Mitsumi CD-RW (secondary
master), and a Toshiba DVD (secondary slave). His machine uses the Award BIOS
Plug 'n Play from July 99. He also has an Intel Pro 2100 internal DSL modem
and a Rhine 3 ethernet adapter.
He wants to dual boot with Windows XP on the larger drive, and Red Hat 9.0
Linux on the smaller drive. The install suffers from two problems:
1) Grub will not recognize the larger drive.
Because the Award BIOS is so old, it doesn't have support for large drives.
Award charges for BIOS upgrades, so he doesn't want to try it if he can find
another solution. Because the BIOS doesn't recognize the large hard drive, he
can't switch it to be the primary drive.
Windows was booting off of the second drive before Grub wrote the primary
drive's MBR. It seems that Linux can also detect the second drive's presence
once the operating system is loaded, but it can not mount it because it is an
NTFS filesystem.
His Grub.conf file looks similar to this:
default 0
timeout 30
splashimage=(hd0,0)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title=RedHat
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/bzImage root=/dev/hda2
title=WinXP
root no-verify (hd0,2)
chainloader +1
2) Red Hat only recognizes the ethernet card, and not the DSL modem.
We haven't looked into this much because we have been working on the
previous, more serious problem.
My friend would definitely like to be able to boot back into Windows without
reinstalling XP. On a side note, his bios currently won't boot off of the
CD-ROM drive, so he is having difficulty using the Windows XP install CD to
overwrite the MBR (and Grub) and let him boot XP. This is why he hasn't just
given up on Linux yet. Hopefully if he can get his system working he'll
really enjoy having both systems.
Any suggestions?
Thanks in advance for your help.
Richard
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