[H-GEN] Dual Booting WinNT/RH6.2 with a dash of SCSI

[Paul Gearon]

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On Tue, 15 Aug 2000, Raymond Smith wrote:

> this on all but one machine. That machine is a dual-processor SCSI
> box. All the others a single processor IDEs.
> 
> The procedure we have followed is:
> 	(a) put /boot on own device
> 	(b) get first 512 bytes of /boot's device
> 		(ie dd if=/dev/[hs]da[0-9] of=BOOTSECT.LNX)
> 	(c) copy over to Windows C:
> 	(d) edit boot.ini, update permissions appropriately (+r +s)
> 
> This results in the NT boot loader displaying a helpful message letting
> you choose Linux or NT. Under IDE I can choose Linux and get dropped to
> LILO from whence I boot. Under SCSI I get a blank screen of death (not
> even the first L appears).
> 
> Any ideas why this would work for NT/RH6.1/IDE but not NT/RH6.1/SCSI?

Not sure about your problem here, but I once had a similar situation going
the other way (booting WinNT from LILO) on a mixed SCSI/IDE system.  
WinNT didn't want to boot up from anything but the first drive, so I had
to tell LILO to swap the bios drive numbering.  ie.
    disk=/dev/sda
        bios=0x80
    disk=/dev/hda
        bios=0x81

Won't hurt for you to try anyway.

I'm assuming that you boot to WinNT with the current bootloader?

If you get really desperate you have 2 other options:
1.  Use LILO.  John suggested this, and I agree.  It's more flexible and
reliable.
2.  Create a tiny partition (~1MB) at the end of your WinNT drive (use
Partition Magic) and install DOS on it.  Then you can have autoexec.bat
call loadlin and you can avoid LILO altogether.  Providing you have a
kernel image in the DOS partition I have NEVER seen loadlin fail.

> Oops. s/WinNT/Win2K Professional/g But you know what I mean ;-).

Since this is only the boot loader I'm guessing that it won't make any
difference.  There was no point in M$ changing the boot loader for NT
since it already worked fine, so hopefully they didn't (unless they were
trying to break Linux).

<dig at M$>
I'm assuming that they didn't change the NT bootloader since they never
changed the Windoze bootloader between WfW and Win95 [read: DOS].  That's
why you could replace the DOS under Win95 with DR-DOS (or NovellDOS as it
became) without repurcussions.  32 bit OS.  Yeah, right.
</dig at M$>

-- 
Regards,
Paul

Paul Gearon
gearon at computer.org

Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum
immane mittam.
(Translation from latin: "I have a catapult. Give me all the money,
or I will fling an enormous rock at your head.")





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