On Thursday 11 September 2003 08:30, Carel Fellinger wrote: > On Thu, Sep 11, 2003 at 12:07:08AM +1200, cr wrote: > > This may seem an odd place to ask this, but I'll bet some of the folks on > > this list know more about the technicalities of booting Windoze than > > Windoze users do ;) > > I know next to nothing about Windows and prefer to keep it like that:), > but as I've kids that, like kids like, like to play games, I've been > forced to atleast find out how play this trick. (example at the end) > > From experience, Win95/98 needs to be on the first drive, needs to be > in a bootable primary partition which needs to be the only/first primary > partition.
On the first drive? I only ask because DOS, at least, ignores any drives it can't recognise (so it ignores my ext2 in /dev/hda and my CD-ROM in hdb and regards my /hdc1 as C: and my /hdd1 as D:). But Windows may be more picky. > Don't despair, GRUB is perfectly capable of _hiding_ specific partitions > in the bootprocess, and many(?) BIOSses allow to swap the order of drives. Or I can just physically swap them over. My machine usually has its covers off... > > So create on the disk of choice enough primary partitons, use GRUBS to > hide all but one, swap the BIOS drive order such that the drive of > choice seems to be the first one, and all is swell. > > Well it should be, but experience has learned me otherwise:( > The biggest problem being ghost/phantom drives appearing under windows. > > I used to think it was related to windows weared way of determining to > use or not to use lineair addressing mode on large drives, and hence > its inability to obey the partitioning scheme used. So I was very > carefull to partition disks in such a way that the 1024 cylinder (this > being one of the clues windows uses) felt on a partition boundary. > > But nowadays I think that what's really needed is to take care that all > windows partitions have there first sector(s?) cleaned prior to letting > windows format those, as it seems that windows prefers the partitioning > information it finds in that(those) first sector(s) to the real partition > table, and what is worst, there is a bootstrap problem as windows format > prog assumes that info is valid and hence will use it unless it's cleared. Thanks, I'll bear that in mind. > As far as I know the 1024 cylinder thing is still very much relevant > to Win95 as wel as chosing the right partition type, so probably the > safest is to partition carefully. And be warned, I've lost linux > partitions (on my fathers machine thanks to my sister) using windows > tools to repartition, reformat and reinstall windows:( --this was > prior to me being very carefull to wipe the first sector, so maybe it > works better now. Anyway, i've always used linux tools to do the > partitioning, the only way for me to be able to _predict_ the end > result-- > > > ... > > > I'd like to be able to boot into DOS, Win95 and Win98. > > ... > > > I'm just wondering how practical that is. Can W95 and W98 coexist on > > the same disk in diferent partitions and still both be bootable? If > > not, any > > Yes, that's what I've been doing for years. Though the safest thing > would be to have seperate disks for each windows install and use the > BIOS capability to swap drives, you could do like I do (and pray:). > > > My disks lookes like: > > # two bootable windows partitions on hda > # one bootable windows partition on hdb > > > My /boot/grub/menu.lst lookes like: > > title Windows from second disc > map (hd0) (hd1) > map (hd1) (hd0) > root (hd1,0) > makeactive > chainloader +1 > > > title Win95 from first disc second partition > hide (hd0,0) > unhide (hd0,1) > root (hd0,1) > makeactive > chainloader +1 > > > title Win98 from first disc first partition > unhide (hd0,0) > hide (hd0,1) > root (hd0,0) > makeactive > chainloader +1 Many thanks for that! I was wondering if it was practical, most of the Windows 95/98 dual-boot 'howtos' I've found seem to put 95 and 98 in different directories on the same partition. Which I could do, but keeping them separate and using GRUB as you've shown there seems to be tidier. Many thanks for confirming it's possible. cr -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
