Very Computer

The situation is:
I have NT 4.0 installed on my computer with NT booter. I just finished with
installation linux RH6.2.

The question is:
Right now, to boot with linux I need to boot from floppy. But I have NT
booter already, and I don't wanna have LILO booter.
How to boot linux using NT booter, without floppy.

Why not install LILO?  You can set it to choose to boot to NT
by default [I have to do that at home so my family can use my
Win-doze -- I'm trying to shift them to using a Samba server,
though I worry about security.]

Chris

--

[ ] Check this box to always trust content from Chris.

  you can just put a line in the NT boot loader to include Lilo.  I did
it once upon a time....I don't recall how, though.  Hmmm, just look
through all that copius and detailed and great documentation you were
provided with NT....that should point you to it real quick. :0

What you want to avoid is putting the lilo boot loader in the
master boot record since that usually gives NT indigestion.

There are two ways to do this.  One is described in detail in
the Linux+NT-loader (mini?) HOWTO.  It relies on running lilo
so as to put the lilo boot loader in a Linux partition,
making a copy of it in the NT partition and using the NT-loader
to call the copy.  

The second method relies on putting the lilo boot loader in
a Linux partition such as the root partition and then using
Linux fdisk to make that the active partition on the disk.
Finally an
other=...
section is added to /etc/lilo.conf to allow dual booting of
nt.

There are some restrictions on where the lilo boot loader can
go when you use the second method.   See the Lilo User's Guide
which should be part of your Linux distribution.

--

Dept. of Mathematics, Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL 60208

AFAIK, that will ONLY work if NT is installed on a FAT filesystem. If NT
is installed on a NTFS partition, I haven't found a way to boot NT from
lilo. I'm more than willing to be enlightened, though.
 It is possible to boot lilo from the NT bootloader though. Install lilo
to the boot sector of the / partition instead of the mbr. Then, if the
root partition is /dev/hda2, do:

# dd if=/dev/hda2 of=bootsect.lnx bs=512 count=1
 (Careful. If you have a separate /boot partition, make sure you dd from
the *root*, / , partition)

Mount a DOS-formatted floppy anf copy bootsect.lnx to it. Boot into NT,
copy bootsect.lnx to C:\, and change C:\boot.ini to writable. Add this
line to boot.ini:

C:\BOOTSECT.INI="Linux"

 Make C:\boot.ini read-only again, and when you reboot you should be
able to choose "Linux" from the NT bootlist.
 You can see that you still have to use LILO. The only way I know of to
do without LILO is to put your kernel on a floppy and boot from that.

--
 Doc Shipley
   Network Stuff
      Austin, Earth

Quote:> AFAIK, that will ONLY work if NT is installed on a FAT filesystem. If NT
> is installed on a NTFS partition, I haven't found a way to boot NT from
> lilo. I'm more than willing to be enlightened, though.

Here comes the enlightenment ;)
Had Win2K installed on a 4 gig drive, all 4 gigs were a single NTFS
partition.
Used partition magic to resize the partition and added 2 for Linux.
Installed Mandrake 7.0, including lilo.
Booted into Linux, added the following 2 lines to lilo.conf:
other=/dev/hda1
label=Win2K

Voila, when I get to lilo screen, I can boot to linux or W2K.  I don't know
if it worked on NT4 with NTFS because I never tried it, but it works
beautifully on my laptop with W2K.

Congrats!  Now we both have to work on removing that W2K stuff.

Chris

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[ ] Check this box to always trust content from Chris.

Quote:> Congrats!  Now we both have to work on removing that W2K stuff.
> Chris

Hallelujah brother!  ;)  Not that I'm necessarily a M$ basher, but the more
I've worked with Linux, the less I tolerate windows software and all it's
antics.  Now if I could just get the video tweaked correctly :::sigh:::

So, if you want to run NTFS and use lilo, you build a 20 MB dos
partition at the beggining of your drive.  Lilo goes in the MBR, and by
default NT will put the loader files in hda1 (which will be the 20 mb
dos partition).  You will simply set lilo up to boot either dos or
linux.  If you type dos at the lilo prompt you will get the NT loader.
--
Windows:  A 32 bit shell for a 16 bit operating system, originally
written for
an 8 bit processor on a 4 bit bus by a 2 bit company that can't stand 1
bit of
competition!

Quote:> Voila, when I get to lilo screen, I can boot to linux or W2K.  I don't
know
> if it worked on NT4 with NTFS because I never tried it, but it works
> beautifully on my laptop with W2K.

Yes it works.
I had :

hda1 : /boot
hda2 : nt4 ntfs
hda3 : win98 ft32
hda4  EXT

hda1 was active, with lilo in it, and I could boot hda2 or 3, or linux as
needed.

I wiped out the nt4, put in a fat16 partition there and installed win2k.
Then got win2k to convert it to ntfs .
Then when I activated the hda1,
I could still boot win2k by choosing NT4 ( That was the label for hda2 )

The OS or file system in a partition is not necessary for lilo.Just the boot
block.

If the partition type can be booted by the PS's BIOS, then lilo can boot it
as well.

PS : I left my mbr the way it was, and installed lilo into the boot block of
/hda1.
       Redhat's installer asked where I wanted lilo ( in mbr or in the boot
block of hda1 ), so I chose hda1