Re: Linux on a 2-Drive Machine

[Brent Harding <bharding@doorpi.net>]

Wow, never thought of switching to boot linux from it's own drive by
loading lilo on it and switching the boot flag. Do I really have to switch
in the bios if I use two different drives, as technically they have
different partition tables and will both be able to be set bootable.
At 07:17 PM 11/13/01 -0700, you wrote:
>On Tue, 13 Nov 2001, John J. Boyer wrote:
>
>> I don't want to do anything to the C drive, least of all
>> writing in the boot record. I just want the D drive to have a
>> complete Linux system.
>
>Here's the partition table for my so called "C:" drive:
>Partitioning info (fdisk -l /dev/hdb):
>Disk /dev/hdb: 12 heads, 35 sectors, 989 cylinders
>Units = cylinders of 420 * 512 bytes
>
>   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
>/dev/hdb4             1       988    207462+   6  FAT16
>
>This means that windoze is on partition 4 of my hdb (2nd) hard
>drive (and in this case, the only partition on that little
>drive).  So you see, the "C:" designation is just a legacy M$ way
>of labeling a partition on your hard drive, an awkward one, if
>you ask me.  The MBR (Master Boot Record) where a previous poster
>told you to put lilo, is a small sector outside any partition on
>the first drive, and is not part of any operating system,
>including MS-WIN9x,2000, or linux.  The MBR is reserved for the
>installation of a boot loader: lilo is a far more capable, and
>versatile boot loader than the usual M$ junk (note that it is
>able to make my second drive appear to be first, when booting
>win9x); there are at least three other boot loaders in common use
>with linux.
>
>There are also boot sectors available on each partition, which
>can be used, if you make that partition boot active, or tell your
>BIOS to boot from that partition (in the case of more recent BIOS
>versions).  I prefer to put lilo on the boot sector of the linux
>root partition, which can be just about anywhere (currently hdc2,
>in my case), if the bios will support it, or, if not, another
>linux partition, and activate the boot flag for that partition.
>That way, ill behaved viral M$ installation software can't make
>linux unbootable.  All I have to do if MS-Windoze changes the
>boot flag, is to change it back to the proper partition.  But
>that is just a matter of preference.
>
>> I understand that I can start it with loadlin after my system
>> boots to dos in the normal way from the C drive.
>
>Often newbies do prefer to use loadlin, till they get greater
>confidence and understanding, but that has it's drawbacks,
>including the fact that the grossly inferior M$ FAT filesystems,
>with their characteristic fragmentation problems, can easily lead
>to an unbootable system.  I suggest you make sure that you you
>have at least 2 methods of booting, including a floppy for
>emergencies, and that you also learn to use one of the rescue
>disk schemes available.
>
>-- 
>L. C. Robinson
>reply to no_spam+munged_lcr@onewest.net.invalid
>
>People buy MicroShaft for compatibility, but get incompatibility and
>instability instead.  This is award winning "innovation".  Find
>out how MS holds your data hostage with "The *Lens*"; see
>"CyberSnare" at http://www.netaction.org/msoft/cybersnare.html
>
>
>
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