Re: System with 2 hard-drives

["S. Salman Ahmed" <ssahmed@pathcom.com>]

>>>>> "PM" == Pat Mahoney <pat7@gmx.net> writes:
    PM>  I'm having trouble understanding this, but, um, you're linux
    PM> fits on a floppy??
    PM> 

No, not quite. Its just the boot sector that I am copying to the
floppy. Frankly, I don't quite understand all the details myself (its
been a while since I read the NT+Linux HOWTO) but the NT boot loader
needs the first few bytes/kilobytes of another OS's installation's boot
sector and then it can boot the other OS.

Once this is done, I copy the debian21.lnx (or whatever) file to my
primary partition where the NT boot loader has been installed and add an
entry in c:\boot.ini for the new OS:

c:\debian21.lnx "Debian GNU/Linux 2.1"

and viola you can use the NT boot loader to boot Linux. The downsides of
this approach are:

(1) its easy to hose the NT boot loader (and your precious NT
installation) if you make a mistake during the Lilo installation since
the NT boot loader is very sensitive to changes.

(2) every time a new kernel is compiled, the procedure has to be
repeated so the NT boot loader knows about the new kernel.

See the NT+Linux HOWTO for more details, and a better explanation!

    PM> 
    PM> I am not familiar with NT's bootloader, but if it can do a
    PM> chainload style boot like grub or lilo does then you sould be
    PM> ok.
    PM> 
    PM> 1) Install lilo or preferably grub on the mbr of the second
    PM> disk, and configure to boot linux on second disk (you should
    PM> also be able to configure it to boot everything else).
    PM> 
    PM> 2) Boot to NT bootloader (after configuring it to boot up second
    PM> drive) and boot second drive.

how would I do step 2 ? I assume that I would follow my own instructions
on creating a new entry under the NT boot loader ?

    PM> 
    PM> 3) Boot linux from grub on second drive.
    PM> 
    PM> 4) Fall in love with grub and install it on first disk.
    PM> 

Can you tell me a little more about grub ? What does it offer over Lilo
?

I know that Caldera is using Grub for the OpenLinux. Does Grub do the
whole Graphical os-selection thing, or is that a Caldera-specific thing
?

Thanks.

-- 
Salman Ahmed
ssahmed AT pathcom DOT com

http://www.pathcom.com/~ssahmed
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