Re: dual boot win2k and debian
I think grub itself is installed OK but maybe you don't have the right stuff in
your menu.lst. I always have a hard time getting it straight when I first set
it up.
I have a grub boot for Slackware, Windows 2000 and BeOS. Here is the line that
gets me to the Win2k boot menu:
title Windows 2000/NT/98 boot menu
root (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1
It is conceivable that grub installs a partition map that reflects the size of
your whole hard drive. With your old bios that could cause problems. Try
checking what your partition table is while grub is installed after booting
linux. Use cfdisk, fdisk or sfdisk. You can get the most detailed and concise
dump of your partition table with:
sfdisk -d /dev/sda
that dumps the partition table in terms of sectors.
Quite unfortunately, the partition table on an IBM-compatible PC is in the same
disk sector as the initial boot loader, sector 0 of the drive, towards the end.
Hard drives have to always be written or read in 512 byte sectors.
In order to write the initial code for a new boot loader to your drive, what is
done is to read the old boot sector, copy the partition table into an image of
the new boot sector in memory, then copy that out to offset zero on the drive in
one 512-byte chunk.
So installing a new boot loader also writes a new partition table, which
hopefully is identical to the original, but I can see how corruption might occur.
Mike
--
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting
http://www.goingware.com/
crawford@goingware.com
Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow.
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