grub/Gentoo kills Windows networking??!?!?!?

wilburpan · l33t Joined: 21 Jan 2003 Posts: 977

This may be the wrong forum for a Windows question, but....

I am trying to install Gentoo on my laptop, which is currently running Win98. I have gotten Gentoo to the point where the base system is installed, and even managed to get my Xircom PCMCIA network card working on my own [pats self on back]. All network functions from within Gentoo are working well. I can emerge packages, ping, etc. without problems.

Then I went into grub to set up dual booting. My partitions are:

/dev/hda1 -- Win98
/dev/hda5 -- /
/dev/hda6 -- swapfile
/dev/hda7 -- /home

I used root (hd0,4) and setup (hd0) to install grub.

When I reboot, I get the grub menu, and can boot into Gentoo and Win98 as expected. Networking from Gentoo works perfectly. The weird thing is that networking in Win98 does not work at all. I am pretty sure the problem stems from installing grub because if I remove grub by using a Win98 boot floppy and fdisk /mbr, my laptop boots straight into Win98 as expected, and networking is magically restored in Win98. If I reinstall grub, the same thing happens again.

Any ideas?

MattElmore · n00b Joined: 01 Feb 2003 Posts: 29

Have you tried powering down the machine completely before rebooting into windows with grub?

wilburpan · l33t Joined: 21 Jan 2003 Posts: 977

Powering down completely and then going straight to Win98 through grub gives me the same result -- Win98 boots, but I have no networking.

Again, fdisk /mbr restores networking within Win98, although I lose access to Gentoo.

christsong84 · Posted: Tue Apr 15, 2003 5:00 pm Post subject:

That is very odd...grub only touches the MBR, win98 networking shouldn't be using that at all...even as an MCP, you lost me there.

kha · n00b Joined: 19 Mar 2003 Posts: 41

Definitly a funny one.

Ok let us try to find out what is happening.

First does windows actually see the controller when booting through Grub or not ? If it is the case what is then the IRQ of the board ? Is it shared by any other device ? In this case playing with "PnP OS" option in the bios might help.

My only guess would be that GRUB either redirect IRQ in a way that windows 98 do not understand, or that it initializes the board in non proper way, leaving it crashed when windows boot.

I am not too experienced with GRUB, I personally use LILO(Have you tried it by the way ? ).

Kha
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Malakin · Posted: Tue Apr 15, 2003 7:12 pm Post subject:

Try lilo and if that doesn't work you can just use a floppy to boot to Linux.

wilburpan · l33t Joined: 21 Jan 2003 Posts: 977

I wound up reinstalling Gentoo, and networking works fine from both Windos and Gentoo now.

The only thing that I did diffrently was that the first time I installed Gentoo, my Linux partitions were /, swap, and /home. This was left over from my previous Linux installation, and I was lazy and didn't change them. This time, I deleted all of my old Linux partitions, and set up /boot, /, swap, and /home as my partitions.

I have no idea what happened the first time, or why a reinstall should fix this problem, but I'm glad that things are working correctly now.

I did consider using lilo, but I have gotten grub to work on my desktop dual boot system, and I'm a stubborn cuss.