John B wrote:
Heya gang,
I just installed W98 on a second hdd for a few games *only*. The way I did it, was open case, unhook Linux hdd and made second hdd hdd0, installed M$, rehooked everything back to normal. Then I tried to use YaST to setup my LILO so I had the choice of windows also to choose from in the boot screen. Unfortunately, it's not writing all the things it apparently needs to boot the windows hdd. All fstab has is /dev/hdb1 and 'other'. Anyone mind showing me their fstab if they're dual-booting or giving me a hint how to have YaST set it up?
The fstab has absolutely nothing to do wiht LILO or any other boot manager. By the time you get to the fstab, which is used by the "mount" program, the boot manager has long since exited, stage right. I do believe that Win98, being just M$-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.) Now we have a bit of a problem, because I believe LILO also cannot boot off anything except the master on the primary IDE -- but at least we can have more than one primary partition, 4 of them in fact (or 3 plus an extended partition, in case you need more). You can put a primary partition on the first drive and hide it whenever you boot DOS (also you have to mark the DOS partition "active"), or you can leave things as you have them and swap the hard drives in the BIOS (using the boot manager, of course). LILO can do all this for you, but GRUB is much easier to configure and maintain. LILO at times seems to me to be cryptic and unintuitive; GRUB is straightforward and intuitive. It's up to you, but I do suggest you install and use GRUB instead of LILO. Either way, your fstab is irrelevant for now, and probably will need modification only if you want to access the Win98 stuff from Linux.