Redhat WinMe Dual boot Pentium 4

Warren Togami warren at togami.com
Wed Aug 8 02:52:08 PDT 2001


Oops.  Sorry about my instructions.  I had completely forgotten about that
"feature" of Microsoft.  Windows 2000 and XP can also destroy MBR LILO
installations during normal boot-up.

I found a consistent way around this problem by always creating a small
primary partition for /boot.  Red Hat recommends at least 20MB for this
partition, and this is enforced in RH Roswell beta.  If you install LILO in
this tiny primary partition, then set it as "Active" in either Windows
fdisk, or "toggle bootable" in Linux fdisk and turn off the *'s next to all
other partitions, then the computer will run LILO within this partition when
the computer starts.  From here it can point to Windows and boot via
chainloader, or point to Linux and boot.

I've recent switched to GRUB that is an option in the RH Roswell beta.  It
is so much nicer than LILO once you learn GRUB basics.  GRUB wont render
your system unbootable if you screw up your kernel when installing a new one
and forgetting to include an old kernel in the menu.  You can choose kernels
within the filesystem at runtime, or boot arbitrary stuff on other
partitions with the chain loader.  Red Hat's GRUB package has an attractive
graphical interface too.  I installed this GRUB into my MBR rather than
/boot, and Windows 2000 hasn't destroyed it yet. =)

I highly recommend people trying Red Hat Roswell beta if you have a good
amount of Linux experience, and you want to try their many new server
configuration interfaces, KDE 2.2 snapshot and many other impressive
improvements.  They have also integrated Chinese, Korean and improved
Japanese input support, although I haven't figured out how to use it yet.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Deven Phillips" <dphillips at viata.com>
To: "Linux & Unix Advocates & Users" <luau at list.luau.hi.net>
Sent: Tuesday, August 07, 2001 11:30 PM
Subject: [luau] Re: Redhat WinMe Dual boot Pentium 4


> I have bad news.
>
> It seems that WinME's bootloader has a serious tendency to currupt the
> LILO bootloader. I have seen four attempts to Dual-Boot ME and Linux,
> and all four failed at the bootloader. You might try using a bootable
> floppy and the normal Windows bootloader. The other option is to use
> something like Notron's System Commander.
>
> Hope that this helps!!!
>
> Deven Phillips, CISSP
> Network Architect
> Viata Online, Inc.
>



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