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Dual boot help


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#1
Doomed_to_a_pathetic_computer

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I'm trying to get my computer to Dual boot with Windows 98 and Fedora Core 4, but most of the sites I found only tell you what to do if both are on the same hard drive. I have Windows 98 on one hard drive and Fedora on the other, yet I'm still not sure how to get them to dual boot.
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#2
Kemasa

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If you can create the /boot partition on the first disk it is easy, you only need 100Mb for that. If you use grub then you can specify which disks to boot from.

Lilo might be easier for what you are doing since that contains the list of partitions to boot from in the boot block (but I prefer Lilo).

According the to grub man page, you can specify the statge 2 boot drive:

--boot-drive=DRIVE
specify stage2 boot_drive [default=0x0]

I am not sure if the installer will automatically select this, but once you install Linux you should be able to select that. Just make sure that when you install Linux that you create a boot floppy so that you can boot the system, just in case of a problem.

With Grub, under /boot/grub there is a file called menu.lst which lists the bootable partitions and the default boot partition and you can edit that, it is just a text file. I suspect that the install process will do the right thing though.
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#3
Thebinaryman

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hard drives are named hda, hdb, hdc, etc. where the letter of the drive continues as to how many hard drives you have. partitions are named by a number after the letter of the drive; ex: hda1, hda2, hdb1, hdb2, hdb3...

hda will be one of your drives, the other hdb. hda1 will be the 100mb boot partition, that is where grub will be installed. a fat32 windows 98 partition can be created on either hda, that would be hda2. and on the other drive you can create a root partition (hdb1), a swap partition (usually around 1gb, hdb2), and a home partition (hdb3).
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#4
Kemasa

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The names that Grub uses is a bit different than hda, etc.

For example an entry from /boot/grub/menu.lst:

title Man10hda3
kernel (hd0,1)/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda3 devfs=mount acpi=ht resume=/dev/hda5 splash=silent vga=788
initrd (hd0,1)/initrd.img

The /boot partion is hda2, so starting at 0, it is partition 1 and is called (hd0,1) in the grub file.. The swap is /dev/hda5 and the root partition is /dev/hda3. The title is set so that it is known what it is. There are only three lines, the middle two above are actually a single line.

I don't have an example of an entry for Windoze as this machine is M$ free, but if it is needed I can get it from another machine, but it uses the (hd#,#) format.
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