Advertisement
If you have a new account but are having problems posting or verifying your account, please email us on hello@boards.ie for help. Thanks :)
Hello all! Please ensure that you are posting a new thread or question in the appropriate forum. The Feedback forum is overwhelmed with questions that are having to be moved elsewhere. If you need help to verify your account contact hello@boards.ie

Re-installing a boot sector + New Linux

Options
  • 21-09-2003 10:48am
    #1
    Butch
    Closed Accounts Posts: 48 ✭


    Hi,

    I will appreciate tips on how to doing the following:

    Current Situation
    PII/266, 128Mb, 2 x HDD 4Gb (will call them HDDA and HDDB)
    HDDA has no boot sector, scratch disk, is recognised as C: FAT32
    HDDB has W2K installed, no boot sector either, is installed as F:, FAT32
    D: and E: are 2 CD-R and CD-RW
    Boot is done from a floppy disk

    Goal
    1. Get rid of the floppy (i.e. installing the boot sector in C: )
    2. Install Linux in HDDA
    3. Being able to boot either one or the other OS
    4. Being able to access both disks from both OSs

    I've got Partition Magic 8, didn't try to use it so far.

    Any good suggestion how do do this?

    Thanks,
    Butch


Comments

  • Options
    #2
    Michele
    Closed Accounts Posts: 11 ✭Michele


    I think fdisk /mbr from within win 2k should do for you. And then install linux boot loader (lilo or grub) which will take care of booting either filesystem and install linux on hda. Once you have linux installed you can mount ntfs partitions (read only ) or fat32 partitions read and write but you cannot access ext3 partitions from within windows. I think


  • Options
    #3
    Butch
    Closed Accounts Posts: 48 ✭Butch


    Thanks for the tip. For a start, I'll try to focus on getting rid of the floppy. Now:

    - I can't find fdisk.* in my W2K installation (neither in the CD)
    - I think that in W2K it's called fixmbr (as well as fixboot)
    - Both should be accesible only from the Recovery console.
    - I can't run the recovery console because of:
    (1) For some unknown reason, I can't boot from the CD
    (2) Installing the recovery console in the hard disk (it does it in my first disk), when I boot it complains on a ntoskrnl.exe corrupted that should be located in \WINNT\system32..."

    Ran PM8. Both Hard disks partitions are active.

    Still can't boot from the HD.

    Thanks,
    Butch


Advertisement