councillor Posted March 22, 2003 Share Posted March 22, 2003 a multi-boot system...??I have w98se, w2k and xp pro now but want a version of linux and really thing i need a boot manager now. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ugly Posted March 23, 2003 Share Posted March 23, 2003 I just use the BIOS to select the particular harddrive. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zox Posted March 23, 2003 Share Posted March 23, 2003 You can go for any commercial ones that are fancy but you can also use LILO or GRUB.Both can be configured very nice to use all your systems. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest ThunderRiver Posted March 23, 2003 Share Posted March 23, 2003 If you find it hard to configure around with LILO, you can also use the boot manager from Windows Xp as well.use BootPart from the maker of WinImage to create a boot bin file and make a link to the bin file, so that nex time when you boot up, the Xp built-in boot manager will let you boot into Windows as well.There should be a tutorial on how to use BootPart laying somewhere, but you should be able to find some guides for it with the use of Google Update: Oh my bad, the instruction for adding linux is at the bottom of the BootPart page. Good luck Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stryder Posted March 23, 2003 Share Posted March 23, 2003 BootMagic from PowerQuest does a fine job when the built in boot manager in Windows just won't do. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest ThunderRiver Posted March 23, 2003 Share Posted March 23, 2003 Yeah hopefully you can still grab a copy from somewhere. BootMagic is discontinued from PowerQuest I remember? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stryder Posted March 23, 2003 Share Posted March 23, 2003 Yeah hopefully you can still grab a copy from somewhere. BootMagic is discontinued from PowerQuest I remember?Sort of. They bundle it with PartitionMagic now. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jomama Posted March 23, 2003 Share Posted March 23, 2003 I use System Commander for mutiboot. I like its partition sizing on-the-fly and usability. Also you can turn it off (disable it). The question is how much do you want spend to do this? You can do it for 0$ or 150. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
councillor Posted March 23, 2003 Author Share Posted March 23, 2003 i think i'll stay with the dos (boot.ini) menu and use the Linux boot floppie to access it when i want it...Thx All........... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stryder Posted March 23, 2003 Share Posted March 23, 2003 http://www.xosl.org/Give this a try. And it's free to boot......all pun intended. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Peachy Posted March 24, 2003 Share Posted March 24, 2003 I would second the recommendation of XOSL. I just spent two weeks learning the ins and outs of multibooting using XOSL and can help you configure it. Currently I can boot Windows NT 4 Server, Windows 2000 Server, Windows XP Professional, Windows 98 Second Edition, Red Hat Linux 8.0, Red Hat Linux 7.3, and DOS from a single menu. You don't need to go to the extreme of what I did (I did it because we had a special need to have students be able to choose those operating systems in our lab!) as XOSL can be used to set up fairly simple boot partition needs. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest ThunderRiver Posted March 24, 2003 Share Posted March 24, 2003 Wow nice :)Well, the computing environment for the students around here use the Windows Xp built-in boot manager.Ony dual boots between Windows XP, and Blue Hat Linux 8.0 (Well, blue because of University of Michigan.. and it is based on Red Hat 8.0)But I definitely will give XOSL a try in the future :)Thunder Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
councillor Posted March 24, 2003 Author Share Posted March 24, 2003 Well, i guess my assumption that i would use the normal "boot.ini" for Windows and a Linux boot floppy to get into it had a problem like(ex);It started loading but aalwas stopped at:kernel panic : no init found (trying harder)try passing init = option to kerneland just sit there.........so my theory didn't work......dah!!!!I've installed....and then re-moved;Mandrake 9, red hat 8, caldera edesktop and suse 7.1......... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest ThunderRiver Posted March 25, 2003 Share Posted March 25, 2003 Make sure you install the linux boot info in the partition where linux is intalled, not the first sector of hard drive! That way, you can use bootpart to create a boot link for boot.ini to load. It shouldn't be too hard.I have experienced the problem you had before, but I am not sure exactly what I did to solve it. Perhaps you should check which primary partition is active because apparently it fails to find what it was looking for/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
councillor Posted March 25, 2003 Author Share Posted March 25, 2003 I have win OSes on my first scsi drive and everything works great, (what i had in mind....because i think everyone better start learning abit of Linux) is this;On my second scsi (all of a 18gig cheetah) is install any new Linux version, but the end result was the above mentioned. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest ThunderRiver Posted March 25, 2003 Share Posted March 25, 2003 councillor: your installation description doesn't mention where exactly you place your boot files. Most importantly, make sure you put boot files or /boot under primary partition.you can place your / or /home under secondary partition.Please note that only Primary partition can be bootable.. not Secondary. And also, you can only have 4 Primary per hard drive. But within one Primary, you can have unlimited amount of Secondary paritition.If you have doubts in mind or don't quite get what I said, check out PowerQuest web site. They should have guide somewhere. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
councillor Posted March 25, 2003 Author Share Posted March 25, 2003 I just checked with PM 7 and i have (2) primary partitions.....and it's on my D:/> primary where i'd like to install a Linux version.I seemingly have no control where the boot files are installed "for linux that is" as i reboot up with the Linux CD inserted in my CD drive and it see the free space on D:/> and auto installs it there........And it's after the total install that i have the problem of it never booting up again....and get the error's mentioned.I want to reiterate on where the boot files are.., I/we all know that my window boot-files are in C:/> for windows........just thought i'd make that clear. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest ThunderRiver Posted March 27, 2003 Share Posted March 27, 2003 What do you mean by "auto install" whenever it sees free space on D? Unless it is Lindows, I think every distro gives you the power to auto resize and everything. I however, had a very bad experience with Mandrake 7.3 because its setup program doesn't ask for partition and directly jumps to installation, which killed some of my data. So I had to choose expert install option to choose what I want. Well, Linux vendors are trying to make users' life better by making its installation simpler but instead, it sometimes makes users' life more miserable than ever.As usual, the setup should let you select which partition you want it to be /boot, / and /home or /etcWell, good luck Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Peachy Posted March 27, 2003 Share Posted March 27, 2003 Please note that only Primary partition can be bootable.. not Secondary. And also, you can only have 4 Primary per hard drive. But within one Primary, you can have unlimited amount of Secondary paritition.ThunderRiver,You need to be more precise in your terminology. Secondary partition is not used; the correct term is extended partition, and technically it is also a primary partition. There can be 4 primary partitions because that is how many rows are available in the Master Boot Record, a.k.a. the partition table. Each row describes the type of partition and defines its beginning and ending cylinder boundary. The extended partition is special in that it contains its own extended partition table. It has 4 rows but only two are used. The first row defines a logical partition in the same way the master partition table defines a primary partition. The second row points to the next extended partition table, which defines the next logical partition, and so on for as many logical partitions defined. The second row of the partition table daisy chains to the next logical partition, so to speak.It is not true that you cannot boot an operating system from a logical drive in the extended partition. OS/2 and Linux can have their boot files placed within the extended partition and made bootable. Although Microsoft doesn't support their operating systems being booted from a logical drive, it is possible. Proof? I have done it myself. Mind you it does require the use of a boot loader, XOSL comes to mind, a partition table editor and a disk sector editor. So, how is this possible? Let's go back to the master partition table. Within each row of the partition table, there is a place where the boot record information is stored. The important point here is that it tells the BIOS where the boot files begin on the partition in order to boot the operating system. What it says is, this partition starts this many sectors from the beginning of the disk. The reason why a Microsoft operating system won't boot from a logical drive is that when a FAT16 or FAT32 (NTFS is defined slightly differently. I haven't tried booting XP or 2000 in this manner, yet, but I read that it is possible) partition is defined as a logical drive, the boot record value defines the beginning of the partition relative to the number of sectors from the beginning of the extended partition. To make a Microsoft operating system, be it DOS, or Windows bootable, that value has to be changed to reflect the logical drive's location in sectors from the beginning of the disk. The XOSL boot loader has no problems booting OSes defined this way. Incidently, if you Ghost this partition and load it back to an identical system, it still boots!You might be wondering why I said you would also need a disk sector editor. Well, in the case of hard drives currently on the market, it is most likely that any logical drive you create will be defined beyond the 1024 cylinder, which would make it unbootable under normal conditions, whether primary or logical drive. This is beyond the scope of the current discussion, but lets just say that you need to rewrite two sectors in the partition you want to boot in order for DOS or Windows to turn on its ability to see the disk in LBA (logical block addressing) mode.Peachy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stryder Posted March 27, 2003 Share Posted March 27, 2003 Please note that only Primary partition can be bootable.. not Secondary. And also, you can only have 4 Primary per hard drive. But within one Primary, you can have unlimited amount of Secondary paritition.ThunderRiver,You need to be more precise in your terminology. Secondary partition is not used; the correct term is extended partition, and technically it is also a primary partition. There can be 4 primary partitions because that is how many rows are available in the Master Boot Record, a.k.a. the partition table. Each row describes the type of partition and defines its beginning and ending cylinder boundary. The extended partition is special in that it contains its own extended partition table. It has 4 rows but only two are used. The first row defines a logical partition in the same way the master partition table defines a primary partition. The second row points to the next extended partition table, which defines the next logical partition, and so on for as many logical partitions defined. The second row of the partition table daisy chains to the next logical partition, so to speak.It is not true that you cannot boot an operating system from a logical drive in the extended partition. OS/2 and Linux can have their boot files placed within the extended partition and made bootable. Although Microsoft doesn't support their operating systems being booted from a logical drive, it is possible. Proof? I have done it myself. Mind you it does require the use of a boot loader, XOSL comes to mind, a partition table editor and a disk sector editor. So, how is this possible? Let's go back to the master partition table. Within each row of the partition table, there is a place where the boot record information is stored. The important point here is that it tells the BIOS where the boot files begin on the partition in order to boot the operating system. What it says is, this partition starts this many sectors from the beginning of the disk. The reason why a Microsoft operating system won't boot from a logical drive is that when a FAT16 or FAT32 (NTFS is defined slightly differently. I haven't tried booting XP or 2000 in this manner, yet, but I read that it is possible) partition is defined as a logical drive, the boot record value defines the beginning of the partition relative to the number of sectors from the beginning of the extended partition. To make a Microsoft operating system, be it DOS, or Windows bootable, that value has to be changed to reflect the logical drive's location in sectors from the beginning of the disk. The XOSL boot loader has no problems booting OSes defined this way. Incidently, if you Ghost this partition and load it back to an identical system, it still boots!You might be wondering why I said you would also need a disk sector editor. Well, in the case of hard drives currently on the market, it is most likely that any logical drive you create will be defined beyond the 1024 cylinder, which would make it unbootable under normal conditions, whether primary or logical drive. This is beyond the scope of the current discussion, but lets just say that you need to rewrite two sectors in the partition you want to boot in order for DOS or Windows to turn on its ability to see the disk in LBA (logical block addressing) mode.Peachy Well that's just peachy! You are right, I have done some of the things you mentioned. Booting linux from a logical partition for instance. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest ThunderRiver Posted March 28, 2003 Share Posted March 28, 2003 Please note that only Primary partition can be bootable.. not Secondary. And also, you can only have 4 Primary per hard drive. But within one Primary, you can have unlimited amount of Secondary paritition.ThunderRiver,You need to be more precise in your terminology. Secondary partition is not used; the correct term is extended partition, and technically it is also a primary partition. There can be 4 primary partitions because that is how many rows are available in the Master Boot Record, a.k.a. the partition table. Each row describes the type of partition and defines its beginning and ending cylinder boundary. The extended partition is special in that it contains its own extended partition table. It has 4 rows but only two are used. The first row defines a logical partition in the same way the master partition table defines a primary partition. The second row points to the next extended partition table, which defines the next logical partition, and so on for as many logical partitions defined. The second row of the partition table daisy chains to the next logical partition, so to speak.It is not true that you cannot boot an operating system from a logical drive in the extended partition. OS/2 and Linux can have their boot files placed within the extended partition and made bootable. Although Microsoft doesn't support their operating systems being booted from a logical drive, it is possible. Proof? I have done it myself. Mind you it does require the use of a boot loader, XOSL comes to mind, a partition table editor and a disk sector editor. So, how is this possible? Let's go back to the master partition table. Within each row of the partition table, there is a place where the boot record information is stored. The important point here is that it tells the BIOS where the boot files begin on the partition in order to boot the operating system. What it says is, this partition starts this many sectors from the beginning of the disk. The reason why a Microsoft operating system won't boot from a logical drive is that when a FAT16 or FAT32 (NTFS is defined slightly differently. I haven't tried booting XP or 2000 in this manner, yet, but I read that it is possible) partition is defined as a logical drive, the boot record value defines the beginning of the partition relative to the number of sectors from the beginning of the extended partition. To make a Microsoft operating system, be it DOS, or Windows bootable, that value has to be changed to reflect the logical drive's location in sectors from the beginning of the disk. The XOSL boot loader has no problems booting OSes defined this way. Incidently, if you Ghost this partition and load it back to an identical system, it still boots!You might be wondering why I said you would also need a disk sector editor. Well, in the case of hard drives currently on the market, it is most likely that any logical drive you create will be defined beyond the 1024 cylinder, which would make it unbootable under normal conditions, whether primary or logical drive. This is beyond the scope of the current discussion, but lets just say that you need to rewrite two sectors in the partition you want to boot in order for DOS or Windows to turn on its ability to see the disk in LBA (logical block addressing) mode.Peachy I agree that I should use terminology better by saying extended partition. I also know that there are OS that does boot from extended partition, but the point is that you can only mark Primary partition active, not extended. So if there is only one OS installed on the system, and for instance, say Windows, Windows gotta put some of the boot files in the Primary partition or C:\..so if C:\ is not active, I don't see how Windows can boot still. In the case of Linux, /boot should be in Primary partition, and yes, I tried to put /boot under extended partitions before and it was an unsuccessful attempt for me, and that's where I got my "Kernel Panic", which I would try to avoid now a day. Perhaps, if you guys can provide me with your hard drive partition configuration. I will have a better understanding how to boot Linux off extended partition.ThunderRiver Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Peachy Posted March 28, 2003 Share Posted March 28, 2003 Perhaps, if you guys can provide me with your hard drive partition configuration. I will have a better understanding how to boot Linux off extended partition.ThunderRiverHere's our 60GB hard disk partitioned in this manner:hda1 Primary 1: NTFS (Windows NT 4.0 Server SP6)hda2 Primary 2: NTFS (Windows 2000 Server SP3)hda3 Primary 3: NTFS (Windows XP Professional SP1)hda4 Extended:hda5 Logical 1: FAT32 (Windows 98 Second Edition)hda6 Logical 2: ext3 (Red Hat Linux 8.0)hda7 Logical 3: Linux swaphda8 Logical 4: ext3 (Red Hat Linux 7.3)hda9 Logical 5: FAT16 (DOS 7.1)XOSL is installed in logical 5; i.e., the program files are placed in the FAT16 partition as hidden files. The initial boot loader code is stored in the first sector of the disk, a.k.a. the MBR. One of the features of XOSL is partition hiding. In effect, when you create a boot menu item you select the partition you want to boot, label it accordingly and then hide one or more partitions. What I've done is to set it up that each Microsoft partition that boots will hide all the other Microsoft partitions so that the OS that is booted will see itself as the c: drive. Very nifty! XOSL doesn't let you hide Linux partitions but that's moot as no Microsoft OS can see it anyway.I used Partition Magic 8 to create the partitions and then installed each OS alone as c:. Ghosted an image. Next. For Red Hat 8 I told the installer program to use GRUB and place the boot sector in the root partition at /dev/hda6. For Red Hat 7.3 I used LILO and told it to use /dev/hd8 for its root partition. The reason I used two different Linux loaders was a problem with Ghost in that it would always trash the second GRUB loader. Using LILO I can Ghost the RH7.3 partition using the -ial and -nolilo switches. It is very important in a Linux install to get the boot loader in the proper partition. One trick is to make a boot floppy for the Linux distro, boot from it, and then configure GRUB or LILO manually. But, the new distros make it fairly easy to install GRUB or LILO in the partition of your choice. Just make sure you don't choose /dev/hda, otherwise it will install in the MBR. You need to specify the exact partition. e.g. /dev/hda6. Remember, Linux calls the extended partition /dev/hda4 and the first logical partition /dev/hda5.None of the operating systems are multibooting other OSes. XOSL does the multibooting. The DOS partition boots into a DOS menu that loads a multi-choice autoexec.bat file that runs multiple Ghost command line options that target each partition with the appropriate OS image loaded from a multicasting Ghost server. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest ThunderRiver Posted March 30, 2003 Share Posted March 30, 2003 mmm amazing. How do you manage to make Windows 98 to boot under a logical partition?You idea makes quite alot of sense, and XOSL is the key to everything it seems. I haven't found any program that actually does the same thing as XOSL except the commercial package Partition Commander 8 from VCOM.Well, I didn't think it was possible to boot Windows Server along with Windows Xp, but I guess with the help from XOSL, it makes everything possible. It now gives me new thoughts with new opportunities with what OS I can put on just one hard drive ;)Thanks Peachy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Peachy Posted March 30, 2003 Share Posted March 30, 2003 (edited) mmm amazing. How do you manage to make Windows 98 to boot under a logical partition?This website was particularly helpful: www.goodells.net/multiboot and the link, Fixing Boot Records in Logical Partitions is the key. A couple of hints on doing this. When you ghost a primary partition into a logical partition for the first time, the boot record is messed up. That's why you need to change the hidden fields value as described in the link above. The other thing is to use XOSL to hide all partitions and boot from floppy. You can boot from floppy using XOSL and hide and unhide partitions as necessary. In this case, boot to floppy using a DOS disk that matches the Win98 version and have the logical Win98 partition visible as c:\. Then use sys a: c: to transfer the system files from the floppy to the partition. You don't have to hide all partitions, incidentally, as you could use sys to transfer the system files to any drive letter.The other thing to note is that if the hard drive is greater than 8.4 GB then you also have to edit two bytes in the partition to enable Windows to boot it as described in the section, Windows 95/98/ME and the 8-GB Boundary. There is a Yahoo Groups forum for XOSL that helped, too.[sorry, all, about the typos. Fixed the links. Should work now.] Edited April 2, 2003 by peachy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest LilBambi Posted March 30, 2003 Share Posted March 30, 2003 Peachy --That's awesome! It sounds like something my Jim and I will be seriously taking a look at.With today's larger hard drives, and the bootloaders sometimes being a bit of a pain when you get too many OSes on one system, this is very interesting.Thanks so much for the explanations. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
colin.p Posted March 31, 2003 Share Posted March 31, 2003 Forgive the late response, but I screwed up my registration and could'nt post.I am running 98 on my primary master and 2000 on the first partition of my primary slave. The 2000 bootloader worked fine and when I added Red Hat 8 to the mix, I had a problem with getting grub to work ( I have an old K6-111 computer) and there seemed to be a problem with the 1023 cylinder limit.I found this great boot manager called GAG ( It stands for Graphical Boot Manager in Spanish) It will boot 9 OS's and will set the drive letters and the boot process. It works fine as I can boot into windows (98 and 2000) and Linux. It's at Source Forge Net:http://gag.sourceforge.net/download.htmlIf anyone wants a "no brainer" boot manager check it out. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest ThunderRiver Posted March 31, 2003 Share Posted March 31, 2003 colin.p, wow! very very nice link you have provided us there. I took a look at the screenshots they provided there, and it looks great. Thanks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest ThunderRiver Posted March 31, 2003 Share Posted March 31, 2003 mmm amazing. How do you manage to make Windows 98 to boot under a logical partition?This website was particularly helpful: www.goodells.net/multiboot and the link, Fixing Boot Records in Logical Partitions is the key. A couple of hints on doing this. When you ghost a primary partition into a logical partition for the first time, the boot record is messed up. That's why you need to change the hidden fields value as described in the link above. The other thing is to use XOSL to hide all partitions and boot from floppy. You can boot from floppy using XOSL and hide and unhide partitions as necessary. In this case, boot to floppy using a DOS disk that matches the Win98 version and have the logical Win98 partition visible as c:\. Then use sys a: c: to transfer the system files from the floppy to the partition. You don't have to hide all partitions, incidentally, as you could use sys to transfer the system files to any drive letter.The other thing to note is that if the hard drive is greater than 8.4 GB then you also have to edit two bytes in the partition to enable Windows to boot it as described in the section, Windows 95/98/ME and the 8-GB Boundary. There is a Yahoo Groups forum for XOSL that helped, too. Peachy, I have problems with the following linkshttp://www,goodells.net/multiboot andhttp://www,goodells.net/multiboot/diskedit.htmYou sure that's the right address or the server of theirs went down? Also, what is ptedit? Is that from PowerQuest?Thanks for all the interesting information. I have never thought about the possibility with logical partitions until now Thunder Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest LilBambi Posted April 1, 2003 Share Posted April 1, 2003 I had trouble with one of them too ... I just replaced the www, with www. and it worked fine.It was just a typo in one of the addresses. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest ThunderRiver Posted April 2, 2003 Share Posted April 2, 2003 I had trouble with one of them too ... I just replaced the www, with www. and it worked fine.It was just a typo in one of the addresses.oh yeah! that . does the trick .. thanks Lilbambi Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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