Mounting Existing Linux Partitions

[lilpaul]

Im farily new to linux and have just installed fedora to my machine.

I wanted to use the nt boot loader instead of grub, so installed it to the /boot partition instead of the mbr.

The problem is FC2 doesn't allow you to create a boot disk, and as such i cannot boot my linux partition.

I've been told that its possible to mount existing linux partitions in knoppix, then I can use dd to extract the boot sector to be able to add it to my nt bootloader.

I understand how to extract the boot sector, but not how to mount and use my existing partitions.

Can any1 help me with this.

[baldyeti]

Mounting is easy, and "mount /mnt/hdXn" run as root under knoppix should work (with appropriate values for the disk X and partition n). knoppix should have detected existing FS and added entries for them in your /etc/fstab. Otherwise you can simply create you own mount point (eg "mount /dev/hdXn /tmp/myboot")

But you don't actually need to mount a partition to get its boot sector, "dd </dev/hdXn >/tmp/hdXn.bs count=1" will do

[eco2geek]

The problem is FC2 doesn't allow you to create a boot disk, and as such i cannot boot my linux partition.

(It doesn't? OIC, kernel 2.6 is too big to fit on a floppy.)

There's a generic GRUB boot floppy image you can modify to suit your needs on the Knoppix mirrors as well, in the /contrib directory. You just have to edit "menu.lst" to suit your needs.

ftp://ftp.orst.edu/pub/knoppix/contrib/grubboot.zip