Very Computer

Hi,

If anyone can shed any light on the following problem, I'd be very grateful.

My PC already has one hard drive installed - 13Gb with the following
partitions: 1Gb Win95 (FAT), 4Gb NT (NTFS), 2Gb extra (FAT).  The
remaining space is unpartitioned.  I want to install RH 6.1 on this
machine, but would like this on a separate drive (I don't really like
the idea of both Linux and various windows on the same drive).  So, I
installed a 1Gb drive as the 2nd device on the primary IDE channel with
the intention on installing onto this.  I will be using the NT boot
loader to manage the multiple boots.

However, attempting to use Disk Druid to partition this drive led to
rather infuriating problems - it would refuse the put the Linux '/' fs
on hdb (the 1Gb disk) and would insist on putting it on hda (the disk
with NT, etc. on it), this is regardless of what I made "allowable".

Eventually I thought I might as well just install Linux on my 13Gb disk
so went ahead and found I had rendered NT unbootable.  I suspect that
Linux fiddling with the hda parition table confused NT into not finding
where it was installed at boot time.  Anyway, I have fixed this now.

So, my real questions are:

Why won't Disk Druid partition '/' on hdb?

Is there something unacceptable about booting from a disk that isn't
first on a particular IDE channel?

How can I install Linux on hdb, whilst leaving hda untouched (I have a
lot of Visual C++ work there)?

Many thanks in advance for any help.

Toby Blake
Computing Officer
Division of Informatics
University of Edinburgh

Any drive on the first IDE-channel should be bootable. The second,
third... could be a problem due to BIOS limitations. However the
bootloader (LILO) and its related files (such as the kernel) has to be on
the first 1024 sectors of the drive. With the linux partition as the last,
the bootloader probably is out of the 1024 sector bounds, and won't
work. But it should be able to install on hdb and the bootloader should
work here too.

The problem that NT can not boot anymore, is probably because you
installed LILO on the master boot record (MBR). It tries to load LILO
instead of NT's bootloader. Solution:
 1) Boot to a DOS disk with fdisk.
 2) fdisk /mbr
Now your system should boot NT again.

Rasmus B?g Hansen

===============================================================================
    ,-----.
   {|[;["[|=-.   ?l blev jo opfundet ved en fejltagelse
   `|[.[ [| ))   Fejltagelsen bestod i, at det ikke blev opfundet noget f?r
    |[ [ [|//                     -- Monrad & Rislund
    |[ [ [|'
    `====='

Thanks for your reply.

Quote:> Any drive on the first IDE-channel should be bootable. The second,
> third... could be a problem due to BIOS limitations. However the
> bootloader (LILO) and its related files (such as the kernel) has to be on
> the first 1024 sectors of the drive. With the linux partition as the last,
> the bootloader probably is out of the 1024 sector bounds, and won't
> work. But it should be able to install on hdb and the bootloader should
> work here too.

Yes, that's what I thought - hdb is an empty drive, so it's a little odd
that it will refuse to put the root partition here.  Any more ideas?

Quote:> The problem that NT can not boot anymore, is probably because you
> installed LILO on the master boot record (MBR). It tries to load LILO
> instead of NT's bootloader. Solution:
>  1) Boot to a DOS disk with fdisk.
>  2) fdisk /mbr
> Now your system should boot NT again.

This wasn't the problem - I installed LILO in the Linux root partition.
NTs boot loader would load OK, but then couldn't find ntoskrnl.exe.
Once I had deleted the Linux partitions that I had put on hda, it could
find it again.  I can only assume that Linux had changed something in
the partition table that confused NT.

Thanks
Toby