Hi guys,

I have a weird problem.

If your dual booting with XP and rh 7.2, what would cause you to see this on your screen instead of lilo?

L

Yep, just L

Well I wanted to install linux at home, so i could do some work, then apply it to servers, etc..

I have xp on my computer, just xp.

So i got rh 7.2 cds, booted from cd 1, installed it

During the install, i choose it to install to MBR instead of first sector to partition?

I"m trying to remember what it said in the install, sorry guys

So anyway
I choose Deafult boot image: -- as in i check boxed it.
DOS
/dev/hda1

^^ that's my xp

I think that's about it.

I installed linux the first time, but i DIDNT check default boot image, or anything.... so after i was done, i saw L instead of

lilo:

or

boot:

whatever itis

so then
i re installed
and this time i checked default boot image and made sure it was /dev/hda (my xp)

and still
after the re install

L

is what i see
its driving me nuts
ALL i want to do is install rh 7.2 on my home box...... What am i doing wrong?

note:
i don't have a floppy drive, so i never make boot disks
i don't have my xp cd.
my cdrom is SLOW and works half the time..So i hate installing, becaues it takes forever for the rpms to copy. I'd rather post here first.

How did i get back into xp you ask?

I just booted off my win98 cd, went to dos, and ran:

fdisk /mbr

it worked, that's how i am here.

Any ideas?

OH, i forgot to mention:

i have two hard drives in this computer.

1. 15gig hd, full 15gig fat32 partition with xp on it. installed to c:\
2. a 10 gig ide hd, BLANK, ZERO partitions created on it. completely blank. empty.... there were NO partitions before installing rh 7.2. i created the partitions in the setup for redhat

/dev/hda is my 15gig fat32
/dev/hdc is the 10 gig hard drive

made a swap /boot and /

one of the things i did was i booted into "redhat linux rescue mode" or whatever. booted off the cd, typed linux rescue, then it dropped me a shell.

from there, i mounted my /dev/hdc the hd linux is on)
/dev/hda is my xp, and hdc is my linux drive. Anyway
i mounted /dev/hdc2 to /mnt/hdc -- then i went into /mnt/hdc/etc/ and lokoed at lilo.conf
and it had "lba32" in the conf, somewehre near the top, 3rd line or something

I never did understand, because /dev/hda is my 15 gig.

I didn't get to finish explaining everything to you, so I'll post it here. Since I have never setup a dual-boot with two separate hard drives before, this is my best guess. As far as I know, I don't think you can dual-boot under your current setup. You installed LILO on the master boot sector of the first hard drive, but the /boot partition is on the second hard drive, so it can't find the files it needs to continue booting and hangs. You either have to go into the BIOS and make the second hard drive bootable or swap the two hard drives. Then edit lilo.conf as necessary and rerun LILO or just reinstall Red Hat and it should work. I think it uses CHS addressing for non-boot drives by default, so you might have to set lba32 for the Windows XP partition in lilo.conf to get Windows XP to boot. I could be totally wrong though, but that's my best guess.

What I do, which works for any number of boot options, is just install/run lilo (if it's a second drive you install it on, you can make that first partition active, if you want), and I just copy the first 512 bytes into a file that's created from the root partition of Linux. Then I just mount a floppy (or mount a FAT partition) and copy that file over. I boot into Windows and change the boot.ini file to give me an option to boot into Linux, for example, and when selected it calls to that file I created. That will boot me into Linux, or I can select Windows. There's no reason to pay for any expensive or fancy boot tools, when you have lilo, or the Windows bootloader. Either can be used to boot into the other one. Certainly there's better tools to boot into multiple OS's, other than lilo, but I think it works fine and I've never had a problem with it -- although I simply use the boot loader in NT or Win2000 to boot into whatever OS I choose (one of about 12 or so).

Very useful.
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Bootdisk-HOWTO/a1483.html

I've got it all fixed now.

thanks guys