[robnelli]

I've just installed SuSE 8.0 on my machine. The machine has two harddrives (40mg-primary, 8.4mg-slave). Windows 98 is on hda1 thru . SuSE install properly installed Linux on hdb6 (swap) and hdb7 (Linux-reiser) on the slave drive. The install never asked how or where to install Lilo, but I assume it put it in the MBR of the slave drive. Again, no problem since the MBR on the primarr drive was untouched so I can still boot Win98. I created a Linux boot disk from within the Suse YAST in Linux. I also copied loadlin.exe and vmlinuz (my kernal) to the C: partition in windows so that I can dual boot from the DOS autoexec.bat. Now I figure I have 2 ways to boot Linux ... but neither work.

When I boot with the boot disk and select "Boot Installed OS", Win98 boots and not Linux. How do I get the boot disk to boot from the slave-hd MBR and not the primary-hd MBR?

When I boot from DOS and select to boot Linux (as described in "The Loadlin+Win95/98/ME mini-HOWTO" by Chris Fischer), the loadlin process starts ok, but then aborts and starts the reboot cycle. The command being executed is:

c:\loadlin c:\vmlinuz root=/dev/hdb7 ro

and the resulting message in DOS is:

"Loadlin ........................ (etc.) "

I've double-checked that loadlin and vmlinuz were copied properly to c: and that hdb7 is where linux is installed. What could be causing Loadlin to kick out without successfully booting Linux?

The only way to successfully boot Linux is to boot from the install CD and begin the installation. When the installation choice option comes up (New Installation, Update Installation or Boot Installed System) I select the boot option and from there Linux booting occurs successfully.

Any suggestions?

[wassy121]

use rawrite (dd in linux) to copy the kernel byte-for-byte onto a seperate floppy disk. This will allow you to boot linux no matter what. You can also create a grub boot disk, they have images on the internet (it is the binary image from ftp.gnu.org) If you go for the first way it will start loading linux as soon as it starts accessing the floppy, the other way you will have to do some command line stuff (specifically:
root (hd0,6)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz
boot
)
another thing you could do is boot into linux, and make a backup of your MBR with `dd if=/dev/hda of=/root/bootsect.dos bs=512 count=1` which says "take the data from /dev/hda and put it into /root/bootsect.dos, but only 1 section of 512 bits". After that, try installing grub or lilo, see if either of those will boot windows, if they will great, if they won't and you want to go back to the other way, reverse what you did before with `dd if=/root/bootsect.dos of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1`

[robnelli]

Well, I tried copying the kernal (vmlinuz) to a floppy as you stated and booting from there. But when it started up, I got:

Loading........................................... ..........................................
.................................................. ..............................................
AX:0212
BX:B200
CX:5101
DX:0000,
0200
(repeating forever)

There must be a standard way of booting when Linux is installed on /dev/hdb.