Re: Getting dos hard drive to boot from lilo

[Gil Andre <gandre@arkeia.com>]

Cheryl,

I am not 100% sure I understand your problem, so what I write
below may be completely wrong... As far as I understand it,
you are trying to boot DOS (or Windows) from /dev/hdb_, with
Linux probably installed on /dev/hda_

This is a limitation of DOS/Windows systems: they can only be
booted from the first hard disk of your machine (/dev/hda_).
These operating systems simply assume they are the first, only
and/or most important operating systems on your hard disk and
will simply refuse to boot from any other drive.

Whether this behavior is a bug or a feature of Windows systems
is left as an exercise to the reader... <grin>

I think the only way out of your problem would be to install
your Windows hard disk as the first disk in your machine and
move the Linux hard disk in another position, since Linux
does not have the limitations of Windows. A very good source
of information for this is the Lilo mini-howto, that you'll
find at the following address:
http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/mini/Multiboot-with-LILO.html

Another good source of information is the hard disk upgrade
"howto":
http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/mini/Hard-Disk-Upgrade/

And a final source of info would be the Multiple OS howto:
http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/MultiOS-HOWTO.html

Hope this helps!

_______________________________________________

Gil Andre -- Technical Writer -- Knox Software
            gandre@arkeia.com
_______________________________________________

On Thu, 6 Dec 2001 06:51:11 -0600 (CST)
Cheryl Homiak <chomiak@chartermi.net> wrote:

> We have now moved my dos hard drive to hdb (it was hdd before). I was
> hoping not to have to boot in from floppy any more, but to use lilo as I
> did when I had a windows os on hdb. I can boot in with a floppy, and I can
> mount hdb1 and it is my dos hard drive. Both linux cfdisk and dos fdisk
> show it as bootable. I've also used map-drive to switch the drives, but it
> still won't boot. Not a huge problem, as I can go on booting from floppy
> to dos as before, but I would like to know why this won't work. The
> relevant part of my lilo.conf is included below.
> Thanks.