hd install woes

[maul]

i plan to dual boot my one 80gig drive with winxp and knoppix.
i have installed winxp on the first partition. i boot from the knoppix cd and use knoppix-installer and choose lilo to be installed on the mbr after i reboot i get a dual boot menu but i cant boot to windows. i even tried installing lilo on the root partition this didnt even get to the dual boot menu, all i got was "error loading os" message. after both tries since i couldnt boot to windows i tried fixmbr and fixboot from the recovery console, it said it fixed the mbr but i still couldnt boot to windows so i just formatted.what am i doing wrong? is there something i should be doing after the hd install script finishes to make the dual boot work?

thanks

[OtakuPigBoy]

Heya dude ..
Run through the install again - create the partition for Knoppix as normal, install lilo into the partition, not the mbr.
If XP is running on a FAT32 partition ( mine is cause I run a quad boot (98/2K/XP/Knoppix) , and I want all drives writable from anywhere ) mount the XP partition , then
'dd if=/dev/hda6 of=/mnt/hda1/knoppix.boot bs=512 count=1'
where hda6 is your knoppix partition, and /mnt/hda1 is your mounted XP partition.

edit your boot.ini ( in the root of your XP install ) and add the line
'c:\knoppix.boot="Knoppix"'

reboot the machine, and your boot menu should now contain the option to boot to knoppix.

if your XP partition isn't FAT, then you're gonna have to do an extra step, by dding the 512 bytes to a FAT formatted floppy, then copying it down to the XP drive root.
Hope this helps..

[maul]

hey,
thanks, but iam new to this. what does dd if do? and why do i need to do it. i'd appreciate it if u could gimme some more info on the procedure.

thanks
maulin

[OtakuPigBoy]

Heya dude ..
Hrmm - reason for doing it this way is that if you make a boo-boo with linux /lilo it shouldn't shaft your windows installs ( seeing as I write drivers for winblows as my day-job thats really quite important to me ).
What it actually does is leave the boot process in the hands of the windows loader, and copies the lilo boot record in as a boot option.
If you want me to talk you through the process, let me know..

[j.drake]

hey,
thanks, but iam new to this. what does dd if do? and why do i need to do it. i'd appreciate it if u could gimme some more info on the procedure.

thanks
maulin

That one confused me too at first - the main thing to get over is that "if" is not the English word "if" and "of" is not the English preposition "of".

IOW, this is NOT a conditional argument, as I originally expected. This was where having "a little bit" of computer experience caused me problems, because I expected this to be like an if-then-else programming instruction. "if" stands for "input file" and "of" stands for "output file". I think that "dd" is an archaic acronym for "disk dump", or something like that. Basically you're copying a file form one place to another and possibly changing the name. Don't let it bug you.

Here's a great resource for BASH commands (BASH - Bourne again shell- is the name of the typical linux command set): http://www.onlamp.com/linux/cmd/ It's posted on a sticky at the top of the general support forum. Also, if you're in a console and get confused, you can get help by typing "man" followed by a space and a command name. "Man" stands for manual. So, for example, you might type "man dd" in the command console to find out the syntax and possible arguments for the "dd" command.

jd