FEDORA CORE 4 WITH 98SE... MISSION IMPOSSIBLE?

[lynch]

This is getting useless. When are you going to heed the advice given here and stop posting about all the failed attempts you've experienced? You are not trying any of the suggestions given or providing any info asked for.

[PC TECH250]

Quote:

Originally Posted by lynch

This is getting useless. When are you going to heed the advice given here and stop posting about all the failed attempts you've experienced? You are not trying any of the suggestions given or providing any info asked for.

For one XP isn't going on the second drive where one suggestion was made. If it
was that would have already been done. Linux installs to FAT not NTFS. 98 is not
going back on the primary drive ruling out another suggestion there. The question
if you had taken note of was to install Fedora Linux on the WIN98SE drive alone.

[CMonster]

Years back when I was a rank novice at installing operating systems I never seemed to have that much trouble... now I've got mixed SCSI, ATA, and SATA drives

I think the most OSs I ever had installed on one computer was four on two drives, one Windows and 3 Linux -it was pretty simple:

Had Win2K on NTFS on master ATA disk and the slave ATA disk had 4 partitions, 1 swap, and three root partitions for SuSE, Mandrake, and Redhat

The bootloader was on the MBR of the Windows disk, I used the SuSE bootloader because at the time it could boot an NTFS partition, Mandrake and Redhat bootloaders were installed into their respective root partitions so I just had to have an entry for "Linux Other" in my main bootloader that pointed to those partitions -

My only reason for having those three Linux installs on one machine was to offer support and be able to answer questions from friends. Lately I Limit myself to SuSE and Mandriva and I have learned a lot more in configuring them to do what I want than trying every Linux distro flavor of the month.

[PC TECH250]

The initial idea here was to have the Red Hat 9.0 dual boot with 98SE. That was what some
were raving about over other versions. Knoppix and Ubuntu live cds are no problem to run.
Those load right up with a good write to disk. At the same time the idea to get familiar with
the various versions would have to start off with just one. Along comes Fedora core 4.

I do know what you saying about not grabbing at every version since you can take one and
throw an improvement on it and repost it later. The try at having Fedora put it's own loader
onto a root of it's own didn't make the trip. When the loader tried to go onto the first drive
Western Digital's own EZ loader prevented that fast. But the idea mainly is to isolate drive 1
from whatever goes on with drive 2. XP loads default for the system. 98 and Linux would be
for when booting from the secondary by itself, whether by bios order or other means like a
possible drive switch installed. The grub4dos loader failed to linux or 98 when used. OUCH!

[CMonster]

As you have probably figured out by now, this Western Digital EZ Drive/EZ-BIOS kr@p is certainly your problem. Perhaps the drive size was not (or is not) supported by motherboard BIOS (or a previous motherboard) so EZ-BIOS was installed. Dynamic drive overlay (DDO) is loaded each time the system is started and Windows relys on it to read and write files to the correct locations on the disk.

Linux will normally dual boot fine with Windows but you have an exceptional case here.

Suggested solution:

*backup the Win98 data to another drive or CD

*be sure the current system BIOS supports the actual drive size

*remove EZ drive/BIOS and reformat the disk

*reinstall Win98 and restore your data

*install Linux bootlaoder to MBR of Win98 drive

More info:

www.wdc.com/en/library/eide/79-870035.pdf

[PC TECH250]

The EZ drive boot option is seen on the XP drive allowing for booting from a floppy. That is
the item that prevented the Fedora installer from changing the MBR on the first drive. That
is the Lifeguard 2.8 utility that was initially placed there when XP was installed for recovery
if the drive became unaccessible. The current bios supports RAID if ever used.

The problem seen here seems to stem from the Fedora installer not accepting a non Linux
partition in order to install the grub loader when the custom option was used. The manual
edit of the command.com may have to be used there to add a needed line. But that would
make 98 the default loader wouldn't it? The wdc link reached "page cannot be displayed"
error along with the alternative http://www.wdc.com/en/library/sata/2879-001146.pdf

There's nothing to backup on the secondary. Information and files were lost when initially
setup as a slave to the XP. The drive can now be considered an extra multi-purpose drive
and is free for Linux as well as 98. And the "exceptional case" does sum it up. Since a new
recovery tool is available previous files lost in the reformat may yet be recovered however.

[PC TECH250]

POSSIBLE FIX FOR 9X-ME VERSIONS OF WINDOWS TO WORK WITH FEDORA? PLEASE NOTE:

Recommended Solution
I recommend creating a separate partition that is accessible to both Windows and Linux. I'll refer to this as a "share" partition. It must be of type FAT32 (same as vfat) or FAT to be accessible and writable by both OSs (NTFS is not yet an option as Linux does not support writing to NTFS partitions). To make the share partition visible and writable by both OSs, do the following:

1) Create a FAT32 partition that you want to be visible by both OSs. I don't explain how to do that here. I believe you can create the FAT32 partition in Windows using Start->Run->Administrative Tools->Computer Management->Disk Management. Many Linux installation programs (e.g. Red Hat) allow you to create FAT32 partitions during the installation process.
2) For Windows, you don't have to do anything to make the FAT32 partition accessible. The OS will automatically detect it and assign it a drive letter (e.g. E
3) For Linux, do the following steps to make the FAT32 partition accessible:
a) Create the directory that serves as the mount point (e.g. mkdir /osshare). The mount point is the location in the filesystem where you want this FAT32 partition to appear.
b) Put an entry in the /etc/fstab file for the share partition. Be very careful in editing this file, as it's used at system startup! For an example, check out the /osshare entry in my /etc/fstab file. The umask option determines the permissions for all filesystems on the partition.
c) Upon your next reboot into Linux, the share partition should get mounted automatically. If you wish to mount the FAT32 partition immediately, use the mount command, e.g.: mount /osshare
Once you've set up your share partition, you can use it for transferring files between the OSs. For example, I found this invaluable for downloading RPMs while logged into Windows before I managed to get the Winmodem working for Linux.

Things to keep in mind for your share partition:

It's of type FAT32, so Linux functionality such as symbolic links won't work on it
http://www.geocities.com/epark/linux...WTO.html#linux

However this primarily addresses dual booting XP and not 98 with Linux. The primary drive
can be isolated from any operations with the secondary drive with a hard drive selector like
the one seen at: http://www.industechnologies.com/idx400.html

[CMonster]

hmmm... you write a lot

are you still talking about multibooting or just mounting partitions?

You know you should be able to add your Linux to the XP boot loader.

I have successfully dual booted Win95/98/98SE on FAT32 with Linux on separate drives and on a partition on the same drive since 1997 with LILO and more recently Grub using Caldera OpenLinux,Redhat, Corel Linux, Mandrake, SuSE, and other Linux... never a problem installing bootloader in the MBR

The system I am now posting this from has Win98 on a small 5GB partition on /dev/hda (Ultra ATA100 40GB drive), with Mandriva 2006 at /dev/hda3 (it's bootloader is on the same partitin) and it also has a SATA drive with SuSE 10 on it and the SuSE bootloader is on the MBR of the Win98 drive. Everything works perfectly.

I have also multiboot other systems with various drive configurations Linux with NTFS/FAT32 Win2k/XP and 98SE

The only problems I have encountered are when a disk controller was not supported or back when Linux boot loaders did not support booting partitions greater than 8GB (unless there was a boot partition below 8GB), and that the early bootloaders could nt boot an NTFS partition.

sounds like you just need to do a careful read of the man pages for Grub

[PC TECH250]

The description there is a portion of the text found at the link from a Linux installation guide
where it outlines creating a new primary partition by taking a slice out an existing Fat32. It
does this without wiping out any existing data in the original partition. Although the article
more or less details how to multi boot Linux with XP, the XP is not the designate drive for a
change in the MBR. The idea is to use a drive selector to isolate the primary when the Linux
/98 dual boot occurs from the second drive added to the system.

The intent here is to install the Fedora version of Linux to multiboot with 98SE on one drive
without any changes made to the primary XP drive. Fedora has it's own version of grub and
Lilo boot loaders. It does allow another loader to be installed however. The second link can
point out how each drive in the system can be booted from without effecting any other drive
in the case itself. This also prevents the spread of a pc virus if one drive gets infected.

[CMonster]

In all this it is still not clear what exactly your objectives are - it seems you just desire to write about problems you encounter with Fedora

I haven't used Fedora's most recent iteration but regardless of Fedora's GUI based tools, I would bet $20 that the command

#grub-install /dev/hda

will install Grub on the master boot record of the primary ATA hard disk of a normally configured drive, that is a drive without some kind of dynamic drive overlay or BIOS level boot sector virus/write protection, and providing that the MBR is not dammaged.

*note that being installed does not mean 'properly configured' and it would certainly be advisable to have a valid /boot/grub/device.map and /boot/grub/menu.lst prior to installing

have you looked at

$info grub
$man grub
$man grub-install
?