The mailing list adds the [oclug tech] bit itself. You don't have to do any such tag yourself :-) On Fri, Mar 11, 2005 at 09:52:54AM -0500, C.T. Paterson wrote: > Hey folks, relatively new Linux user and new member of > the list, so be gentle. ;> Welcome. We'll do our best to help out. I'll be honest. The LILO situation is confusing at best. You really should see if slackware has the grub bootloader. Its got more brains and makes it much easier to recover from user stupidity. > I had a WinXP machine that I wanted to become a dual > boot machine...at the moment, the best way to describe > my situation is butchered (it's a long story). We've all been there.. :-) > > The end result is I've got two hard drives; a Win > drive and a Slack drive, and my "dual boot" process is > to disconnect one drive from the IDE cable and > reconnect the other. LILO is installed on the MBR of > my slack-drive. Okay. Not exactly ideal. > I was doing this in the expectation that I would be > able to dump Windows entirely, but lack of support for > my printer and scanner in CUPS and SANE force me to > re-evaluate for the medium term. If you want help with these then post as a separate post. > > Two questions: > (1) Is it possible to rig things so that my Windows > will be content to boot when the drive is in the slave > position, and LILO is used with my slack drive in the > master position? I've tried this and get a black > screen after LILO does it's thing. WinXP might be better, but I"m pretty sure that windows still insists on being on the Primary Master ide disk. > (2) Is it possible to install LILO in the MBR of the > win drive (thus win in master position), but leave the > MBR of the slack drive untouched (so if the win drive > went away, Linux would boot happily)? Yes to the first part of the question. You can install LILO onto the windows disk MBR by just specifying that you want it to install onto hda, and have one little blurb for windows to boot on hda1 and boot linux on hdc?? (if you disk is secondary master) Installing LILO onto hdc (for instance sake) so that it will boot correctly when installed as hda is a bit of magic. See the bios= options in the man page. Its voodoo. mh -- Martin Hicks || mort [ at ] bork [ dot ] org || PGP/GnuPG: 0x4C7F2BEE