Mail Archives: opendos/2000/09/27/22:33:55
On Wed, 27 Sep 2000, Glenn McCorkle wrote:
> To switch OSs.... all I do is run Fdisk for the OS I am currently booted
> into and change which partition is "active".
>
> When I reboot, the active partition is the one whose OS is booted.
>
> If I want to boot into Linux, all I do is run Fdisk after booting
> OpenDos and restore the MBR which has LILO in it.
>
> To put things back the way they were..... choose "dos" in the LILO boot
> menu and run OpenDos Fdisk again. This time I rewrite the MBR with the
> "standard" OpenDos MBR
> The MBR containing LILO is saved into a file in the root directory.
This is _much_ more convoluted than it has to be. I've had 3 - 4
operating systems installed on one PC at a time without having to resort
to this kind of work to switch between them. LILO itself, loaded in the
MBR can boot between several different partitions. OS/2's boot manager
does just as well, although it is limited by the fact that it occupies a
primary paritition itself. (Remember, without some severe tweaking,
you can only have four primaries, and the extended partion with
it's logical drives counts as one too). Other loaders, such as GAG or
XOSL do a very good job as well. I never have to touch the MBR or fdisk
or anything else when switching between operating systems - just pick from
the menu of which ever system I've implemented on a given computer.
I'm not saying what Glenn describes is "wrong" - if he's happy with it,
then there's no problem. I'm only responding because there may be people
on the list that haven't had any experience with this and may think it has
to be like this.
Ok, here's my 2c on how to multi-boot with multiple primaries. I create
the first primary parition using a linux boot disk (OS/2 or DRDOS will
work just as well). I leave sufficient space on the disk to add
additional partitions later. I then install any M$ operating system I'm
going to have on the system into this partition before installing
anyhthing else. Windows installs have a tendency to trash any other
OS installation on the disk so I do them before there's anything on the
disk to lose[1].
If I'm going to install another DOS-like OS I create another primary
partition with a Linux or OS/2 boot disk set and set that one active. I
then install onto that partition. DRDOS is a good candidate for
this. Linux, other PC *nix variants or OS/2 can be installed into another
primary or into a logical drive in the extended partition. I prefer
installing LILO into the superblock of the Linux boot partition instead of
the MBR (ex. specify /dev/hda3 instead of /dev/hda in
/etc/lilo.conf - rerun lilo...) unless using LILO as the bootmanager for
the system.
As a side note, I've found GAG to be one of the easiest boot manager type
programs to setup and use. It's simple, free, installs entirely in the
MBR and has a nice graphical menu with password controls and other
options.
http://www.arrakis.es/~scostas/SOFTWARE/GAG/gageng.htm
Again, once I have this setup correctly I never have to touch the MBR, or
fdisk again in the normal use of the machine.
+======================+
| Mark Tucker |
| mark AT tucker DOT net |
+======================+
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