Toshiba Laptop Redhat 9 - dual boot advice needed

[dubl59zy]

I'm trying to find the most effective way to restore my ability to dual boot into XP and RedHat 9.

The story is: My laptop (Toshiba Satellite 5305 s703) came with XP pre-installed. About a year ago I added a second HD into the auxiliary bay, installing a verison of RedHat 9.0 that has been successfully used on this laptop, creating two linux partitions plus on FAT32 partion on the new HD. When installing Linux I installed LILO to handle the dual boot capabilities, which worked fine.

The Windows HD crashed, and was replaced. So, now I have an XP installation which doesn't have the LILO installation, and a second HD (which works fine) which I can look at using explore2fs, but can't use to boot to Linux.

All of the advice I've been able to google so far explain how to install LILO as part of the Linux installation. But I don't want to do this. I just want to re-install LILO onto the boot partition of my new HD.

Note, FWIW, that this machine has no floppy drive. I have no way to boot into Linux right now, other, as far as I know, than running the installer. --sw

[Chris H]

Download and burn an iso image of knoppix, or any other live cd.

Boot up using that and then unedit the lilo.conf file in /etc/ and run lilo (or is it liloconf?). Whatever, that'll rewrite lilo to the mbr on hda.

Alternatively get hold of a copy of partition magic and use the bootloader menu in that to create a bootloader.

[CopperTop]

Or you could try using the Windows boot loader to boot linux:

Using the Windows Bootloader
By default, the installation of a Windows o/s will create a Windows bootloader on the MBR (master boot record). This is the first sector that is booted by the BIOS when you start the machine. Here you will find the windows file boot.ini that tells the system where to get the files necessary for booting each o/s. This file normally resides in your C:\ directory, but may not be visible if you have “Do not show hidden files and folders” and “Hide protected operating system files (Recommended)” activated. Deactivate both of these settings through the following navigation in any explorer window:

Tools | Folder Options | View

Your boot.ini file should now be accessible.

With both Windows and Linux successfully installed, the next step is to make a copy of the Linux boot sector and copy it to Windows. To do this, boot into Linux (using your bootdisk) and switch user (su -) to root. After entering the password for root, your command prompt will change from $ to #. Mount a floppy for creating MS DOS files by issuing the following command:

mount –t msdos /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy

With a DOS formatted floppy in the drive, issue the following command to create a 512 byte copy of the boot sector:

dd if=/dev/hdb1 of=/mnt/floppy/linux.bin bs=512 count=1

where hdb1 is the location of where you installed LILO or GRUB to.
Unmount the floppy and reboot into Windows. Copy the linux.bin file from the floppy to your C:\ directory. Edit the boot.ini file in Notepad by adding a line like the following to the end of the file:

C:\linux.bin=”My Linux Partition”

Also, make sure that the timeout option is set to a value greater then zero. If the timeout option is missing, add the following to the boot.ini file underneath the header [boot loader]:

Timeout=10