HELP with quadboot W98/W2K/Mandrake 7.2/BeOS

[Wade]

Hi folks...

I've decided to add Linux (Mandrake 7.2) & BeOS to my current dualboot
system (W98 & W2K), all seems to be working well, except for this...

Win98 & W2K are on their own FAT32 partitions on my primary hard drive. Mandrake 7.2 is on its own partition on my secondary drive, followed by BeOS in its own partition on the same drive.

Everything seemed to install fine, the Mandrake installer defaulted to grub rather than lilo... but it seemed to boot up & run just fine. The problem started after installing BeOS.

According to the quadboot article at http://www.maximumlinux.com one can use the BeOS boot manager to choose between the Windows OS's, BeOS and Linux... it boots up the two MS partitions just fine, and BeOS also starts fine, but when I choose Linux from my BeOS boot manager I get the following error:

Loading Linux (Mandrake 7.2)
Boot sector signature no found.

Linux still boots up just fine with a boot floppy of course, but of course a boot sector mbr fix would be preferable, and as a complete newbie for Linux & BeOS, I'm stumped... I suspect that I need to somehow restore either grub or lilo, but wouldn't that then overwrite the BeOS bootman? Also, according to the article at the above-mentioned link, linux doesn't need its own boot loader with the BeOS boot manager installed.

Anyone have any ideas?

 

[IamDavid]

You should use the Windows 2K Bootloader for all of the OS's. Then you'll only have one screen asking which OS to boot from.

 

[dapic]

I guess the problem is when you installed linux you opted for installing grub on mbr. if you had installed it on linux's own partition it could have been fine.

I have win2k/linux/BeOS all on one disk and am using BeOS's bootman. It's working fine.

 

[Wade]

IamDavid... thanx for the response I guess... it's not much help.

Dapic... that sounds like the ticket... although the Mandrake installation routine didn't ask me where I wanted grub installed, so I didn't realize I could set it up to stay in Linux's partition.

Do I have to re-install Linux at this point, or is there some fix... as it turns out, I was mistaken in my original post about being able to boot Linux with a floppy... when I use my Linux boot floppy it gets partway through, then stops with some sort of Kernel Panic error.

Cheers,
Wade

 

[Wade]

Ok, I just tried to boot Linux from the floppy again so I could try to get down the relevant crash info.

So it appears to my newbie little brain that the problem is likely got something to do with BeOS having overwritten grub on the mbr... here's the last few lines that come up before the kernel panic error.

-----------------------
Partition check:
hde: [PTBL][1027/255/63] hde1 hde2 hde3 hde4
hdg: [PTBL][788/255/63] hdg1 hdg2 hdg3 hdg4

autodetecting RAID arrays
autorun...
...autorun DONE

VFS: Cannot open root device 22:05
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 22:05
-----------------------

Assuming that all I have to do is fix grub (and move it to the linux partition?) how do I go about doing that when I can't seem to get into linux at all?

Cheers,
Wade

 

[SemperFi]

Wade, I am a Linux newbie my self. When I installed Linux it also installed to MBR with out asking. When the install was complete you can go back and click the buttons of tasks completed. I clicked on I believe it is called bootloader on the menue. Anyhow I clicked it and it asked where I wanted to install then selected the linux partition. Then I exited installation.

I then followed SUOrangeman's instructions found here. You will find this line, "dd if=/dev/hd_partition_I_want_to_boot of=/mnt/drive_c/somefile.name bs=512 count=1" towards the bottom of his post. This needs to be done in Linux. once this is created you will be able to configure the boot loader for 2000 to fire up Linux.

Once I had this working I did fdisk /MBR to get rid of the linux loader. For some reason I could not make a boot disk that worked during installation so this worked well for me.

I hope this helps.

 

[Wade]

Thank you very much SemperFi! I will try to get it together using your (and Suo's) instructions later tonight and will post again (hopefully from my quadbooted Linux box) to report on my success thereon.

Mucho appreciato!
Wade

 

[SUOrangeman]

Actually, bootpart from www.winimage.com does a cleaner job of things now.

-SUO, 2 lazee 2 link