Date:	Mon, 27 Jan 97 22:21:40 MST
Message-Id:	<9701280521.AA21843@rgfn.epcc.Edu>
From:	av568 AT rgfn DOT epcc DOT Edu (Beautiful Savior Lutheran Church)
To:	opendos AT mail DOT tacoma DOT net
Subject:	Re: [opendos] Still can't boot OpenDOS from second hard drive
Reply-To:	av568 AT rgfn DOT epcc DOT Edu
Sender:	owner-opendos AT mail DOT tacoma DOT net

<snip>

>>I posted an inquery yesterday about booting OpenDOS from the second hard
>>drive and haven't got any definitive answer except the one from Church who
>>asked "how did you set up the menu?"

<snip>

>>5.  The menu worked fine.  If I select the first option, MS-DOS 6.2 is
>>booted up as expected.
>>6.  If I select the second option, I get a message "Cannot load DOS press
>>key to retry..."
>
>The exact same thing happened to me; MS-DOS boots fine, OpenDOS gags. The 
>interesting thing is that OpenDOS boots fine off a floppy, and from what 
>a can tell with my hex editor, the boot sectors are nearly identical, 
>except the floppy version is missing the partition info (of course).
>
>>7.  The message came from the OpenDOS boot record.
>
>After rooting about with a hex editor for a half hour, I discovered this 
>too. This is frustrating in that it'll be harder to debug...
>
>>My questions are:
>>1.  What am I doing wrong?
>
>Nothing that I can see; see below.
>
>>2.  Am I stupid or what?
>
>Of course not! :)
>
>>3.  Am I right in assuming that OpenDOS should not be installed onto a
>>second hard drive?
>
>It seems this way to me. I cannot verify if GRUB will boot OD off of the 
>first hard drive; I don't feel like taking the risk of losing most of my 
>data. :)

I confirm my statement here. OpenDOS boots perfectly off the first hard 
drive, but will not boot at all from the second.

Before jumping down anyone's throat, please note that: NEITHER WILL 
MS-DOS. I attempted it just now. True, MS-DOS can boot of a seperate 
partition of the first hard drive (which one to boot from is determined 
by the ACTIVE flag, set by fdisk or by the 'makeactive' GRUB command) but 
try it: ms-dos will just not boot off a second hard drive. Important 
thing to remember when you want to repartition. :)

So the solution? If you want to multiboot two "primitive" operating 
systems (I'll take this opprotunity to add that Linux will boot from 
anywhere... anywhere at all :) they must have seperate partitions on your 
first hard drive.

Whether this rule applies to Winblows 95\NT, I do not know.

P.S. for the morbid: MS-DOS (and OpenDOS, I guess) can't boot off a second 
hard drive because it can't decide which partition to boot. True, the 
ACTIVE flag decides, but there is always one active partition on each 
hard drive. So, how can MS-DOS choose between the active partition of 
hard drive 1 or of hard drive 2? It can't, so it simply limits itself to 
booting off the first hard drive.


--
Beautiful Savior Evangelical Lutheran Church - av568 AT rgfn DOT epcc DOT edu
We have what you need-- A Savior!

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