Re: booting W95 from a second harddrive with grub
I believe that you are getting too complicated. Windows is, indeed,
not very flexible but I am not sure that the comments in this thread
are either correct or relevant to the real problem.
What one needs is a good boot manager in the MBR of the first
hard disk on the system. GRUB is an excellent boot manager for
this purpose and, to my thinking, it is more intuitive than LILO.
I believe that the crux of the problem is that ae.roy's GRUB
command line was too complicated.
What happens is the passing of control from the MBR to the first
sector of each partition which then boots the OS in that partition.
Once the MBR has passed control to the boot record of another
partition, Windows cares no more than any other OS which
physical disk or which partition it is on provided always that the
Windows tools have declared its partition bootable. These tools
vary from one release of Windows to another but they do not
restrict you to making only the first partition bootable.
Assuming that ae.roy keeps his Linux on /dev/hda and Windows95
on /dev/hdb, this is accomplished with the following simple
command:
title = Windows 95 chainloader = (hd1, 0)+1
(N.B. in GRUB, *everything* is numbered from 0. Thus the first
partition record of the second physical hard disk is (hd1, 0) and its
boot sector is (hd1, 0)+1 )
On my system, GRUB runs from a Caldera boot partition. In
addition, I boot Windows 2000 plus two other Debian Linux
distributions from GRUB using this simple chainloader syntax.
Each of the two other Linux installations have LILO in the boot
records of their respective partitions.
There was a reference in the original message in the title line to
``Windows NT". If there is an NT partition in this system, then this
example syntax might not apply. BTW, Microsoft did not write the
Windows NT boot manager. It is the OS/2 boot manager; Microsoft
licensed it.
Please excuse the brisk tone of this message. My overall approach
is: K.I.S.S. --- Keep it simple, ... Do let me know if the suggestion
works.
On 13 Oct 2001, at 13:23, dman wrote:
Date forwarded: Sat, 13 Oct 2001 13:38:51 -0400 (EDT)
Date sent: Sat, 13 Oct 2001 13:23:21 -0400
From: dman <dsh8290@rit.edu>
To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
Subject: Re: booting W95 from a second harddrive with grub
Forwarded by: debian-user@lists.debian.org
On Sat, Oct 13, 2001 at 10:08:38AM -0700, Tim Moss wrote:
| On Sat, 13 Oct 2001 12:08:38 -0400
| "ae roy" <ae.roy@operamail.com> wrote:
|
| > I have lying about a 120MB drive, very old, with W95 on it, and
I'm
| > trying to
| > boot it using grub, but it doesnt work. This is
what I have in my grub
| > fi
| > le
| >
|
| Windows' system partition has to be on the first disk.
Yeah, windows isn't flexible at all.
| With lilo, you can use the
| disk=
| bios=
| options (see man lilo.conf) to "switch" the disks around. I don't
know | if grub has a similar option but it might be something to look
for.
Yes, grub has the 'map' and 'hide' commands, but they only work if
the BIOS supports mapping drives. The easiest thing is to put the
windows disk first and the linux one second because linux is nice
and flexible and won't complain about it (just be sure and update
your menu.lst and fstab first so they point to the right disks).
HTH,
-D
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