dual drive bootup problem

[Paul Howarth]

On Mon, 2005-05-23 at 14:47 -0400, Jim Li wrote:
> hi,
> i am having problems trying to get a dual drive bootup to work. i
> check out the following link for help:
> http://www.linuxforums.org/tutorials/1/tutorial-3573.html
> and basically follow its instruction. my original config. is a dell
> machine (optiplex pentium III) with windows2000 on the primary ide
> drive (hda1). i want to add another (secondary) hard drive (hdb) to
> the machine. so i took my fedora 3 installation disks and tried
> installing them. i created three partitions + a swap ( /, /boot,
> /home, swap).  i use the option of putting the mbr not to the primary
> hard drive partition, hda1, which is my windows mbr, but a partition
> on the secondary hard drive (hdb1 or /boot). after installing, i
> reinsert disk1 to the cdrom to do a linux rescue, since the bootloader
> at this point still only boots up window2000 only. after mounting
> /mnt/sysimage which is hdb5 (the root dir, /), i mount /hda1 to
> /mnt/sysimage/mnt/windows (a directory i created to mount the C:/
> drive of windows). i did the following command: dd if=/dev/hdb1
> (/boot) of=/mnt/sysimage/mnt/windows/linux.bin bs=512 count=1, (which
> i believe is the mbr bootup image of fedora)... and basically move
> this binary file to hda1 (or C: drive), mv linux.bin
> /mnt/sysimage/mnt/windows. so after that i did an "exit" to reboot the
> system. after rebooting, i got into windows and modified the boot.ini
> file by adding one line at the end: c:\linux.bin="My Linux Partition".
> so i reboot the machine again.. and at the bootloader menu, i select
> the linux partition option. it brought up only one word "Grub"... and
> the system stops and never continues. my question is: is it possible
> that i did something wrong when i use fedora option to copy the mbr
> image to /dev/hdb1 (/boot)? i really don't want to have lilo be my
> dual bootloader 'cos that means i need to backup my windows stuff and
> reinstall windows as a secondary and not primary drive.

You might find bootpart (http://www.winimage.com/bootpart.htm) an easier
way of doing this. It runs under Windows and will (a) write out an
appropriate boot sector file, and (b) edit your boot.ini accordingly.

Paul.
-- 
Paul Howarth <paul at city-fan.org>