Boot Manager Question.

[Arkas]

I just installed yoper in my hda4 partition which was formatted by yoper as reiserfs (hda1 Windows NTFS, hda2 Windows FAT32, hda3 swap) and during the installation i chose to install grub on hda4. I knew that would create a problem of not being able to boot into linux since there is no option for bootdisk in the installation. I want to use Windows Bootloader (Don't ask me why and tell me how lilo and grub are better i just want ) but the problem is that when i follow the instructions used in Mandrake and RedHat (and worked) nothing seems to happen.

I mount the /dev/hda4 partition using Knoppix Live Cd and do:
mount -t msdos /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy
dd if=/dev/hda4 of=/mnt/floppy/linux.bin bs=512 count=1
umount /mnt/floppy/

This writes a file linux.bin on the floppy but when i open it with notepad in windows its empty!!!

As i said before this worked using mandrake and redhat with the bootloader installed on the /dev/hda4 partition.

What am i doing wrong? Does anyone know how to make this work without installing a linux bootloader in MBR (again i don't want to do this and i don't want to install it and later remove it using fixmbr - i've had bad times with this one to many times)

Could it be the fact that i installed grub as a bootloader in /dev/hda4 instead of lilo although being experimental in Yoper?

I also never used reiserfs as the filesystem before. I always used ext3.

Thanks for all your help.

[drakebasher]

You ought to look into creating a boot floppy to boot to GRUB and then to your Linux. I haven't yet found how to make a floppy with the splashscreen menu, so you may be stuck with manually entering the required input in GRUB each time you boot. Something like this:

root (hd0,3)
kernel /(yourkernel) ro root=/dev/hda4
initrd /(yourinitrd)

Otherwise, if you really want to use the Windows boot loader to start Linux, you can try sending a polite e-mail to Mr Gates in Redmond, Washington, c/o Microsoft and then wait patiently for a reply.