[CS-FSLUG] Dual Booting

john-thomas richards jtr at jrichards.org
Wed Feb 9 19:53:13 CST 2005


On Wed, Feb 09, 2005 at 08:21:55PM -0500, Christopher Rose wrote:
> This is somethings I'd rather not ask about, however, given I preparing to re-enter school, I feel I must. I am preparing to begin taking classes to earn a BS in IT, however the school only uses windows. I had to scrounge up up an old 1.2GB drive and dust off (literally) an old copy of win98 (not even win98se, just win98). Now then, how do I get my computer to dual boot using Grub so that I do not have to constantly swap out hard drives for the next two years? Please make it simple. I have already learned that hooking up the win98 drive to the ide slave cable doesn't work. I do know that the drive is /dev/hdb1. How do I get Grub to ask if I want hd root=/dev/hda1 or hd root=/dev/hb1?
> 
> Any help would be appreciated.

Your /boot/grub/menu.1st file probably has a section similar to the
following:

title           Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.8
root            (hd0,1)
kernel          /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.8 /dev/hda1 ro 
boot

This would correspond to the grub boot option "Debian GNU/Linux, kernel
2.6.8".  (Your actual boot option is most likely different.)  To get
grub to offer you a choice to boot the Win98 installation, you will need
to add an additional entry to /boot/grub/menu.1st (that is menu.one-st,
not the letter "l").  It will be *similar* to the following:

title         Windows 98
root          (hd1,0)
makeactive
chainloader   +1

Pay attention to the "root" line; grub starts numbering drives and
partitions with 0 rather than 1.  For example, my Debian section above
is the first hard drive (hd0) and the *second* partition (hd0,1).  Your
Win98 is likely the second hard drive and first partition and would
therefore be (hd1,0).  I am not sure how you have your Win98 drive
partitioned, however.
-- 
john-thomas
------
Better than a thousand days of diligent study is one day with a great
teacher.
Japanese proverb




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