Trouble with grub

chrisashton84 · Posted: Tue Mar 09, 2004 2:12 am Post subject: Trouble with grub

I'm trying to dual-boot Windows 98SE and Gentoo (for gaming, mostly) but my grub config isn't working. This might be the wrong forum, but it could be an amd64 issue (single Opteron 240).

jhuebel · Posted: Tue Mar 09, 2004 3:26 am Post subject:

Try adding "makeactive" as the next line after "chainloader +1"...
_________________
Jason Huebel
Retired Gentoo Developer (2003-2005)

chrisashton84 · Posted: Tue Mar 09, 2004 4:28 am Post subject:

Thanks, but it didn't work. Just added that line to the text it spits out. Actually I'm pretty sure the text being there isn't an error but Windows hasn't cleared the screen yet. I see the Windows loading screen for just a fraction of a second before it goes back to text. Mandrake's boot didn't work either (Windows loading screen just kept going and going and going). :'( :'( I haven't made a single change to the partition from within Linux! No resizing, reformatting or anything! The only difference is I formatted all the drive as a ton of FAT32 partitions to get Windows to recognize it so it would install, then reformatted the other partitions but I never touched Windows. Why oh why can't I play Second Life? :'(

PS Mandrake SMP is horrible and I've been lucky to have it run for 5 minutes solid. Even the boot disk freezes up. I used LILO in Mandrake (It's what I thought had been working before I installed Grub).

PS PS The system isn't hard frozen, I can Alt+Ctrl+Del and it reboots just fine from where Windows stops working.

chrisashton84 · Posted: Wed Mar 10, 2004 2:07 am Post subject:

Still no luck, any ideas?

NateZ · n00b Joined: 05 Feb 2004 Posts: 9 Location: not found.

just wondering...but why are you using 98SE, especially on an amd64?!?

Joe_H · n00b Joined: 26 Feb 2004 Posts: 5 Location: Chicago

Not why do you have Win98SE on an Opteron 240...

HOW do you have Win98SE working? You mention Mandrake SMP so I think you've got a second Opteron there. If so... how did you ever get Win98SE installed?!?

Grub works fine with AMD64. I believe you have to emerge it static. But I'm doing quite fine multibooting FreeBSD, Gentoo and a few Windows things.

FYI... The Unreal Tournament 2004 demo runs quite well using both of my 240s on Win2K3. Same game does equally well under Gentoo, but I've not got the sound working there yet.

I'll include my grub.conf file here below. I had to
do something a bit odd to get FreeBSD to work. You may want to try that to get Win98SE to work.

Good luck.

/boot/grub/grub.conf

chrisashton84 · Posted: Wed Mar 10, 2004 11:25 pm Post subject:

Joe_H · n00b Joined: 26 Feb 2004 Posts: 5 Location: Chicago

Your xscreensavers locking up too, huh? It bugs me since I'm inclined to believe it's a graphics driver issue.

Well. Your Linux experience surpasses mine. My _Unix_ experience is deep and long. But it's mainly been Solaris these last few years.

I'm not certain I can help that much. Forgive the obvious things you already know. You might learn more from others correcting my misunderstandings. But here goes...

First, the obvious. You really should consider WinXP or beyond. But if you were working fine with Win98 before, then this shouldn't be necessary.

My last box was a Win98/Win2K/FreeBSD multiboot. I left a bit of space for Linux but never really got around to it.

On that box, I used BootMagic/PartitionMagic. BootMagic is similar to Grub in the way it is homed on a particular partition/OS. If you wipe that partition or OS, you lose your ability to boot. (I found that out the hard way.)

Now I've got a much stranger configuration:
Win2K3 on IDE; Win2K3 on SATA RAID; WinXP on SATA RAID; Gentoo on IDE; FreeBSD on IDE. Eventually, I'll shift the unices to the SATA RAID whenever support exists for this.

But I've got a number of failsafes for booting. I can use Windows stuff to reset my MBR if I so choose. I can quickly reinstall FreeBSD's bootloader. I can use the LiveCDs for Linux and fix grub. That is to say, I have an independent mechanism to get to each OS (or family thereof) should any single bootloader fail.

However... at several steps of my install I temporarily lost ability to boot to previous stuff. I didn't lose any OSs. I just had to rework bootloaders, etc., to get it all working together.

From my experience, I believe that unless you're _actively_ doing stuff you typically don't lose data or partitions, just the ability to access them or boot them.

So... I don't think Linux is overwriting or corrupting Windows. The issue seems to be Grub overwriting the MBR. Whatever bootloader you use, it has to work with Win98 (though right now I cannot figure out why Grub and LILO aren't working for you). If you can spare the change, look into PartitionMagic/BootMagic. I know that'll work for you. Or you can try the shareware PartitionStar/BootStar.

A huge benefit to BootMagic (and possibly BootStar) is that you can create a rescue disk to reset the MBR back to it if Grub or LILO fail you.

Oh yeah. One other possibility... I corrupted the Win2K installation by splitting the former Win98 partition in two (that's when I lost BootMagic). This really confused the BR and related files over there since the partition addressing they were using was rendered incorrect. I couldn't correct it. Maybe editing a file shoved it past a boundary?!? But again, I didn't lose the data. I just had to wait until I could access that partition from a working, bootable OS.

Maybe if you're creating partitions _after_ installing Win98, you're confusing it too. Something like PartitionMagic knows what to "fix" in the Windows installs when doing this. Linux fdisk's of course won't touch anything in Windows installs.

Good luck.

GoingDown · Posted: Sat Mar 13, 2004 6:40 am Post subject: Re: Trouble with grub

get sirius · Guru Joined: 27 Apr 2002 Posts: 316 Location: Madison, WI

Best forget windows 98; it will not work on an SMP machine, even if it's just, as in your present case, SMP-capable. Windows 2000 Pro will work just fine.