Dual boot system

[Mike Bilow]

Let's see... lots of targets here.

You wouldn't be using an AGP card with a Trident chipset, would you?

You don't provide enough specific information to address the dual boot
issue.  You mention that you have both IDE and SCSI, which can get
complicated.  Basically, both NT and Linux are going to have to use the
BIOS to load their initial code -- there is no other way -- and you will
need to locate all of that initial boot stuff in places accessible to the
BIOS.  This means that you need to make sure that all of the pieces which
will be loaded by BIOS are within the first 1024 cylinders.  Even if your
BIOS supports LBA for the IDE drive, it probaby will not work for SCSI.

It is a good bet that you are running into a 1024-cylinder issue when DOS
works but neither NT nor Linux will.  This is because DOS locates all of
its critical information at the beginning of a partition.  NT and Linux,
which use more sophisticated Berkeley-style filesystems, put their most
critical information (the root directory) in the middle of the partition
for the sake of efficiency.

You also do not specify what the failure mode is.  For example, often Lilo
will fail during boot by saying only "LI" or something like that.  This is
an important clue as to what is going wrong, since Lilo uses the posting
of the letters of its name as checkpoint signals about the boot progrss.

-- Mike


On Sat, 18 Mar 2000, Randall Hofland wrote:

> Hello;
> 
>     I finally gave up on trying to set up SuSE 6.3 for a dual boot
> system. Although my original clean install of 6.3 worked flawlessly on a
> K6 system except for the video card which failed with both LINUX and NT
> (same problem with several cards suggests a problem with the AGP port
> itself), all of my recent efforts at installing a dual boot system on a
> dual Pentium system using multiple partitions on a SCSI and IDE drive
> combination have led to much wasted time.
>     Plus I now face the possibly of corrupted boot disks for both NT and
> SuSE as neither even boots up for a clean install: SuSE hangs during the
> uncompress/install step in YAST 1 or 2 (with and without the boot disk)
> and NT has similar problems now with the boot disk (probably an NT
> modification of the boot disk since I forgot to write protect the disk
> before attempting the install). I am now unable to get either hard drive
> to install either of the two OSes. Makes me wonder if NT has done
> something to my drives despite multiple efforts to get SuSE to
> repartition the drives. Please note that DOS 6.X installs without any
> problems but I have not yet tried Windows 3.1.
>     I have instead started trying to get the Mandrake 7 system to boot
> up on my dual Pentium boxes with fresh 9G UW-SCSI drives and seem to be
> having somewhat better luck at this (a server install in progress on one
> machine and nearly complete as I write). Has anyone successfully created
> a dual boot system with Mandrake 7? I'd like to boot up NT and LINUX
> using LILO on the workstation mentioned above using the SCSI drive for
> BOOT and SWAP partitions and the IDE for ROOT.
>     I'd really like to have a dual boot system rather than setting up
> separate boxes.
> 
> Thanks!


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