Re: Booting Linux from windows 2000
On 09 Nov 2002 02:39:33 -0500, Scott Henson
<shenson2@silvercoin.dyndns.org> wrote:
>On Fri, 2002-11-08 at 14:18, Pigeon wrote:
>> It is true that Windoze doesn't like changes to the MBR. To hack the
>> Win98 MBR I had to include code to put the original MBR back after the
>> hack had done its work, then make Windoze reinstall the hacked version
>> after it had done its check. That relied on having DOS available
>> underneath and probably would be much harder in 2k. It's not something
>> I would really recommend!
>
>No, Windows 95/98/ME all do just fine without the MBR. You can have lilo
>or grub steal it and windows wont even figure it out. Now Windows
>NT/2000/XP all need the MBR and wont boot without it. Under these you
>have to use the windows boot loader to load grub or lilo then they
>continue to boot linux. Best way is probably to make a grub boot floppy
>though.
Dunno about 95/ME. I dual-boot DOS6.22 and Win98SE by having 2 primary
DOS partitions and swapping the bootable flag in the partition table;
LOADLIN.EXE gets me from either of these to Linux. The code I inserted
into my MBR examined the bootable flags and did nothing if 98 was
booting. Nevertheless, 98 objected to its being there and responded by
running my IDE drives in "MS-DOS compatibility mode". So it looked
fine on the surface, but ran slow(er). Maybe there's some way of
fooling Windoze on this issue and lilo/grub are smart enough to know
about it?
Pigeon
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