Installing windows 98 & Linux in the same m/c

[Vimala L]

Hello there.

I have HP Pavilion PC 8513 - Pentium III 500 MHz that came with windows 98 installed.

I want to have both windows 98 and Linux in the same PC.

I have 3 hard disks (10GB, 40GB, 40GB). I installed Redhat Linux 7.3 on Slave hard disk. Linux works fine.

After installing Linux, I tried to install windows 98 using recovery disk. The installation goes throug fine but when I try to reboot the system, it hangs with the characters "GRBU". Keyboard inputs are not accepted at this point. The only option is swith-off the PC and reboot using Linux boot disk.

Has anyone tried to install both windows 98 & Linux on same m/c?

Your inputs to make my system have dual OS is very much appreciated.

Thank you,
Vimala.

[Daimian Woznick]

Do you know what your master boot record is pointing at? If you can get into linux you can configure lilo to change the boot record. lilo will then prompt for what OS to load. Look at the lilo.conf file for configuration.

[Ted M Johnson_1]

I know this may sound like a pain, but you may need to disconnect all the HDD's except the Windows disk to install Win98, then after you've verified that it boots, connect the other HDD's back up and load Linux last. This way, you can allow grub to overwrite the Win98 boot info and take over the job of booting your system.

[Alan McNeil]

The spendy solution is System Commander. I have a system with DOS6, Win98, Win2Kpro and Linux 2.5.25 all on one 40M disk. SC7 even has a graphical boot manager with pictures of the system boxes (or a penguin for linux).

One free solution is lilo.
Make sure your lilo has theses lines (assuming windows is the C drive)
#
other = /dev/hda1
label = windows
table = /dev/hda
#
That adds a windows boot to the lilo list.

Alan

[John Russell_6 · Accepted solution]

Hi,
The best way is to start again. You're not using lilo you are using grub as a boot manager so editing the lilo.conf file(if it exists)won't do anything. Make a bootable Win98 floppy disk and copy the \Windows\Command\fdisk.exe file to it. Boot from this disk and type fdisk /mbr Remove disk and reboot. That should allow Windows to boot (if it's been installed on the 1st master hard disk, which it should have been). Once you have Windows running OK then re-install Linux on the disk of your choice (but not the Windows disk !).

Hope this helps.

[Vimala L]

Thank you all.

Every message gave me a clue on the things I need to care about and that helped me to understand the configurations and solve the problem.

After trying out various things, I re-installed win98 first on primary master disk and then installed linux on primary salve. Installed linux with GRBU boot loader. Everything works fine now.

Thanks again.