Vince Littler wrote:
On Thursday 10 February 2005 7:50 am, Darryl Gregorash wrote:
I do believe that Win98, being just M$-DOS 6 with a GUI, does not know about modern things such as booting off something other than the master on the primary IDE -- hda aka. hd0 To make things worse, this being DOS, there can only be one primary partition on the boot device. (Someone please correct me if I am wrong, but I believe this limitation does no longer exist in Win2K or XP, but both still must boot from the primary/master.)
Correction coming up. Your version is the simple version of the story. The original PC design provides for up to 4 primary partitions on a hard drive,
Thanks for clarifying this. The point I was stumbling around, which you state in your third paragraph (and which is quite clearly explained, as I have seen, in the GRUB info file), is that all other primary partitions must also be marked as "hidden" --if-- they have some other DOS or Windows version installed on them. What I am not clear on then can be stated this way: if you have, let us say, XP and DOS 5 installed on a system, and you wish to boot XP, is it necessary to hide the DOS5 boot partition? The GRUB documentation suggests the answer is yes, but Linux documentation is often notoriously out-of-date.
Booting MS98 from the second hard drive is 'unsupported' but possible with some limitations. The best is to make space for a tiny primary partition....
Alternatively, I believe it may be possible to point GRUB to the boot sector on the second hard drive and boot that, even if the pc bios will not boot it, or if the bios is still set to boot from the first drive. Note that if the installation was done with this drive as C:, the registry may be confused, unless the installation partition is the first FAT partition on first and second drives, in which case it may be accepted as C:, even though it is on the second drive.
In fact, the solution in both GRUB and LILO is to remap the drives, exchanging the two drives in the BIOS tables. This is done with the GRUB "map" or LILO "map--drive" statements.
Now we have a bit of a problem, because I believe LILO also cannot boot off anything except the master on the primary IDE....
True, LILO and GRUB are subject to exactly the same rules as DOS. As above, LILO and GRUB can be configured to manage hiding and unhiding.
Here I am asking whether or not LILO can boot a Linux installation which is fully installed to, say, the primary slave drive. I said that I think the answer to this is "no", whereas GRUB certainly can boot such a Linux installation. OTOH, paying a bit more attention to the lilo.conf manpage and I dig up this: # global options: boot=/dev/hda <snip> image=/tamu/vmlinuz label=tamu root=/dev/hdb2 vga=ask # # other operating systems: other=/dev/hda3 label=dos other=/dev/hdb5 label=os2 loader=/boot/os2_d.b table=E: so it seems that the answer is "partly no". This is from LILO ver 22.3, and may or may not represent a change from earlier versions.