RH Linux has problems booting up

[ChrisDunn]

Here's the lowdown. I have Redhat LInux installed and want to dual boot with Windows XP. One main problem I am having is that when my machine boots up it goes into protected root mode automatically because it says there are some issues with the booting up process. This happened even before I tried adding XP to it. So I tried going into bios and having my machine boot from the floppy but when it does this (to install windows from cdrom) the machine says that windows detected another OS and asks if I would like to delete and write over it. Because I don't have any pertinent files in Linux right now I say go ahead. But then the machine sort of just has my screen blink and it continues to do that for hours on end until I shut off the power. Then if I power up again and have bios boot from the hardrive Linux tries to load and I ahve the same issue as was mentioned above. So then I thought I would try to run LILO from the root command prompt but that is to no avail. Any and all suggestions would be greatly appreciated Please forgive me for being a novice. Any help and any book/site suggestions to expand my knowledge is also greatly appreciated. Thanks,


Chris

 

[ifincham]

Hi,







Seems a bit of a mess - that may be ntldr doing the protected mode stuff if you had NT/W2K before. Basically, what you need is either to reinstall lilo in the master boot record with an entry to chain load the nt/w2k/xp loader or let that one have the MBR and config it via boot.ini to chain load lilo in another (linux) partition.
So you have one boot loader in the mbr and the 'other' one in the relevant partition - either lilo calls the ntloader or the ntloader calls lilo.






If you have a linux boot floppy try this :







(i) boot to redhat



(ii) edit /etc/fstab and add the entry 'loader = /boot/chain.b' to the block that refers to DOS or windows so it looks something like this :







other = /dev/hda1



label = win



loader = /boot/chain.b







(iii) Make sure that it has 'boot=/dev/hda' at the top of file (means write into the master boot record) and then re-write the MBR as root with the command '/sbin/lilo -v'.



(iv) reboot and try again...







For the other way around see -->

http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/mini/Linux+NT-Loader.html

Hope this helps

 

[ChrisDunn]

Thank you very much for the advice I will try it tomorrow and let you know how it went. Please forgive me for being a novice. Any help and any book/site suggestions to expand my knowledge is also greatly appreciated. Thanks,


Chris

 

[Guest_imported]

Hey,i am very new to the linux environment and got into problems right away,i have 2 hard drives on my computer,a 15GB drive which has Win2000 professional version installed on it and the other drive is a 4.6GB drive with redhat 7.2 installed on it,while installing linux,i have selected DOS to be my default boot drive and installed the server of redhat 7.2,now the problem is when i am booting up with the 4.6 linux drive as my primary master,it is giving me a menu to choose from DOS and Linux,its loading alrite and taking me into linux if i select linux but when i am selecting DOS,it is not taking me to Win2000,instead it will say Loading DOS and then it will show me a message " L? " and the cursor will blink here,the keyboard will stop responding and the only way out i have is to hard boot the computer,can anyone please help me out in sorting out this problem,thanks a lot

 

[ChrisDunn]

Just to give an update, I unfortunately had to reinstall windows98 back on my machine because I needed to use some programs for class that were only supported in windows. I will eventually hopefully be making this box a server with Linux (maybe the week break between the end of spring and the summer semester) and purchasing a used laptop to install windows on. Then I will try and set up a wireless network in the house. Any suggested readings for the server, wireless network, etc. would be greatly appreciated.

Please forgive me for being a novice. Any help and any book/site suggestions to expand my knowledge is also greatly appreciated. Thanks,


Chris