Dual boot an rx2600: RHAS2.1 and W2K3.

[Doug_95]

I need to set up an rx2600 as a demo system. I want to have three operating systems on the system ready-to-go: HP-UX, Windows 2003(W2K3), and RedHat AS 2.1 Beta (can't afford to buy the real deal for a demo server.)

I only have two drives, so I have to dual-boot one of the drives with W2K3 and RHAS2.1B.

I have tried many things. The most sucessful was the following process:

1) SmartSetup (1.07) to load various utilities and create the MSR.
2) Load W2K3 using half of the 32G disk and a NTFS partition.
3) Load RH from the install disks without using the HP Enablement Kit for Linux.

The end result of this process was a bootable RH OS, but the W2K3 partition was somehow corrupted. It would boot up to the splash screen and then die.

The HP Enablement Kit did not work. I used this on a bootable W2K3 disk and it immediately wrote over the boot partitions when I selected the RH install from the main menu.

I suspect this is unsupported, but I have heard that it will work. Anyone out there doing this?

[Thomas Bianco]

You're on you own for HPUX, but here is the method I have used to get Linux and Win2k playing nice together.

Load windows, nothing special.

Load Linux, be sure the boot loader is in the PARTITION boot record, not the MASTER boot record. Also ensure your on a PRIMARY partition. Drop into windows and use diskmgr to set the Linux partition active.

Boot Linux, and create a bootsec.lin file by running the following

dd if=/dev/sd? of=/bootsec.lin bs=512 count=1

Take the bootsec.lin file and drop it in the root of the Windows partition. Modify your boot.ini file by adding this line
c:\bootsec.lin="Bluehat Linux Advanced Server 0.01"

Alternatively, you can load Linux on a partition <= 7gb, and load windows on the second partition, and modify your Linux boot script by adding an option boot the second partition boot record.

since you can have multiple bootsec.XXX files I suspect HPUX will be the same, but I've never set up HPUX on an Intel.
c:\bootsec.hp="HPUX 11.11i^2"

[Thomas Bianco]

forgot to mention, until you get the bootloaders straight, you'll be selecting the os using the "active" partition flag, so get cosy with Diskmgr, CFDisk and it's hpux equiv.

[Rick Beldin]

You will probably have to have HP-UX using its own disk and perhaps its own elilo partition.

Windows and Linux can probably share, since Linux can read windows partitions, but no other OS can read HP-UX partitions.

[Doug_95]

Sorry for being so late in gettng back. I won't be able to try the solution for a couple of days.

The HP-UX partition will go on a seperate disk, no need to try and triple boot a single disk.

I will report back when I have tried it. Probably Friday or early next week if the computer gods allow.