RE: Help installing NT and Linux
There are some pecularities with regard to MS
OS's that you need to watch out for. They require that their boot
partition be marked
active or bootable. You can do that with Linux's fdisk. Linux doesn't
care whether its
partition is marked active or not. (If you run multiple independent MS
OS's , i.e. not
a dual boot setup through the boot sector loader, you'll want to use a
boot manager
that will mark the MS partition active before loading the boot sector for
that OS. Recent
versions of LILO won't do this (at least the last time I checked it
wouldn't), so you'll need a
boot manager. (I use OSBS and like it.) Again this is only true if you
are running multiple
independent MS OS's you don't need this if you only have NT and Linux or
if you are
allowing the MS boot sector loader to handle dual booting.)
I don't believe your setup will work. I'm pretty sure NT boot partition
has
to be on a primary partition on the first drive. This partition has to
be either FAT16 or NTFS
ans has to be large enough to hold NTLDR and boot.ini and ???. The
partition holding the
WINNT directory can be on any disk in either a primary or extended
partition. (Note: Under
NT terminology the boot partition is the one containing the WINNT
directory, the system
partition is the one containing NTLDR. This is counterintuitive and
against convention. Most
people refer to the partition containing the boot sector loader as the
boot partition and the root
or system partition as the one containing the OS. I'm using conventional
terminology and not
NT terminology.)
You have two choices I believe:
1) Let the NT drive be the master drive. You'll have to use the debian
installation disk to
mount the Linux root partition from the second drive and change the
/etc/fstab file.
Also create a new boot floppy from the debian installation menu and
after rebooting with it, make the necessary changes to the LILO
configuration. You'll need to
install LILO as the master boot record on the first disk, in order to
boot to either NT or Linux.
(There is also a program called bootpart that will allow you to boot
Linux from the NTLDR
menu. Then you would not need to install LILO as the MBR.)
2) Let the Linux drive be the master and find a way to create a small
FAT16 or NTFS
primary partition on the Linux drive. You'll need to set this up as NT's
boot partition. Again
you can use LILO as the MBR to boot between Linux and NT. (You may need
to install LILO as
the MBR after installing NT. I've had NT complain about the MBR if it
isn't one that comes with
one of the MS OS's.)
Good luck,
Tony Richardson
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