Triple boot DSL/Dos/fedora
Forum: HD Install
Topic: Triple boot DSL/Dos/fedora
started by: The_Prophet_Jonah
Posted by The_Prophet_Jonah on Nov. 18 2006,17:46
In my continuing storrryyyyy about booting all three from Grub, while and at the same time having my Scuzzy drive picked up... ASUS mainboard, onboard USB x2. Ethernet x2. P-III chipset and processor, CMedia sound/game card, NVidia geForce2 3D, Adaptec scuzzy adapter.
128 megs of RAM (I know, I hate that, I could conceivably with only a small investment of a week and a half's pay up that to 2 Gigs) (contributions encouraged
) running at 1 gigahertz.10 gig HD on IDE-1 as master, loaded with MS Windows M E
CDR/RW on slave.
40 gig hd on IDE-2 as master, temporarily a 170 meg hard drive with the DSL iso copied onto it.
The 40 gig originally had FC4 which is such a bloated kernel and caused so very many headaches and much cursing on my part...
4.5 G scsi disk as /sda. First partition was winfat32 LBA and used mostly for my DOS swap file, second linux swap.
Ok the final score.
I put my linux enabled IDE hard drive on the first controller, as master.
cfdisk'ed it to 4 partitions of 10 G apiece, set the first one as ext3 for the DSL install, second partition as Win32(LBA) to replace the vfat on the scuzzy disk, 3rd partition empty, but ext for whenever i put something else on it.
Might mirror the /tmp directories in both DSL and Fedora on that partition.
Installed DSL. Got a working grub menu.lst, which only booted DSL, and I should interject at this point, still won't boot DOS. No big loss.
I put the winblows disk back on IDE controller, just swapped the cables at the dual IDE controller....
ran (dos) fdisk/mbr
Booted into Winblows, safe mode, formatted the (now) hdc2 partition as win32. booted it to see if it worked.
It did.
Broke out my FC 1 install disks.
Restarted my puter, went into BIOS and changed the boot order to boot from Scuzzy first.
Installed an FC1 workstation on sda1.
This got me a second working Grub, which I edited in the install process (only good thing about the anaconda installer, you get a GUI menu for configuring Grub, like configuring LILO in Suse.anydistro)
on the Advanced tab, reset the boot order to reflect the BIOS boot order. ie scuzzy first.
Added DSL into the bootlabel list, but for some reason, anaconda didn't pick it up as being a Linux distro,
Got a grub.conf that said fedora core, dos (which didn't work still) and DSL but with DSL supposedly rootnoverify, chainloader+1 just like a dos partition.
While installing FC1, I put the dos disk in fstab as mount point /dos, the DSL similarly.
Booted fedora, satisfactorily. rebooted, tried DOS no luck
Rebooted, tried DSL got the chainloader+1 routine. and a snotty little error message that basically it wasn't a dos type partition.
OK....
booted back to fedora, turned off my cable modem. signed in as root, popped up a text editor, opened /boot/grub/grub.conf (fedora's way of writing menu.lst)
Opened /dsl/boot/grub/menu.lst.
Copied the dsl entry and pasted it into /boot/grub/grub.conf
edited the line saying linux24 root=/dev/hda1, because I had physically switched the cables round. Changed it to /dev/hdc1.
IMPORTANT
i forgot to put before that line and under the --title dsl--
line
a very important grubbish command
root (hd2,0)
tried to boot it, failed but remembered that one line.
booted fedora one more time, added the line, rebooted, chose dsl from the menu and success!
I just ain't gonna mess with trying to boot winblows from grub.
If I need to run something dos-ish that won't run in dosemu or wine, when I reboot the computer I will change the boot order in BIOS, do whatever the hell needs done in winblows and change it back when I'm done.
A lot easier on the brain, won't waste another 2 days and blow off 3 successive linux installations trying to grub winblows.
And I won't curse nearly as much, thus i shall build up a lot more good karma.