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leejosepho
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13 Jul 2010, 12:46 pm

DentArthurDent wrote:

... also glad you are acquiescing to the second of my 'custom rank' entreatments, now for the first one, any chance of some action on that one? :wink:

I do not know what you have in mind there, but I do always at least consider just about anything placed before me. Contempt prior to investigation can usually do little more than sustain ignorance.

I am definitely headed toward looking into all the Linux things being suggested here, but I am presently having to deal with a bittersweet configuration issue ... and this old standby Win98 is as far as I can get into my machine at the moment!

When the Debian installer could not get GRUB written to the Debian "/boot" partition, I ended up having it use LiLo instead ... and that ultimately turned out well concerning the Linux addition. However, it did concern me at the time that the installer had to write something to my machine's MBR in order for Debian to then be able to boot and run ... and then last night I discovered all of that had to do with my third drive, a SATA, and that Win98 could no longer boot because my BIOS/DOS/MBR mix can now make the SATA drive available to Win98 without Win98 needing the SATA drivers it does not otherwise have available. Cool ... yet that also means Win98 had to be reinstalled into "G" since the SATA coming into the mix has bumped Win98 out of its previous "F" position. So, I have just spent the morning getting Win98 back in ... and now I must go figure how to get my overall boot menu working again so I can get into 2k, XP, Win7 and Debian.

See you all again in a few hours, I hope ...

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Fuzzy
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13 Jul 2010, 2:55 pm

leejosepho wrote:

DentArthurDent wrote:

... also glad you are acquiescing to the second of my 'custom rank' entreatments, now for the first one, any chance of some action on that one? :wink:

If you are not master of the multi-boot after all this is done, I dont know who is.

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leejosepho
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13 Jul 2010, 3:44 pm

Well, I know how to get stuff to multi-boot on some machines I happen to have here, but I have been surprised to discover how different things can be from one machine to the next as well as from one OS to another ... and then there is the matter of how useful this kind of "system" really might be for anything much beyond personal entertainment and being certain I always have *some* way to get to WP! In any case ...

I chose "repairing" my XP installation as the simplest way to get a 98, 2k and XP boot menu going again -- XP is right now being updated once again -- and I am pretty sure the Debian stuff in the MBR will not have been affected by that. However, Win7's "startup repair" from the original DVD did *not* bring Win7 back into the mix -- Win7's BCD is still not being invoked at startup (note: a previous re-installation of 98 (a week or so ago) had *not* affected it) -- and I do not know the best way to deal with that without risking whatever Debian (or maybe I did) in the MBR on my third drive. One MBR utility I ran a little earlier today saw my third drive (where Win7 and Debian reside) as being first (primary master), so I quickly got out of there before really messing everything up!

As soon as XP's updates finish, I am going to try running EasyBCD there and see what I might be able to do about getting Win7 and Debian back into my startup menu without having to do a "repair" of Win7 and risk corruption of whatever Debian has set up and needs to get going ...

Still hanging on the edge here ...

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leejosepho
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13 Jul 2010, 6:42 pm

Jlenegan wrote:

GRUB needs to get installed to the MBR of the first drive to boot (in the bios). Ususally /dev/sda (for sata drives) or /dev/hda if you have an IDE hard drive. You have to edit the grub.cfg to set up your other operating systems. This is detailed in the manual.

If you know how to do that, or if you or anyone else could at least point me toward the manual and help me along a bit, I just might have to go that direction.

Win98, 2k an XP are together on my first drive, and their own Windows-standard "boot.ini" gets each of them started just fine ...

Quote:

[boot loader]
timeout=8
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Pro" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Windows 2K Pro" /FASTDETECT
C:\ = "Windows 98 se"

But as for Win7 and Debian, they are together on my third drive and Win7 thinks that drive is first. I used EasyBCD to delete Win7's BCD version of "boot.ini" altogether, then let Win7's installation disk make a new one, but either it wrote it to its own drive rather than to "C" or else that Win7 BCD simply does not get invoked even if it actually *is* on "C" (where I believe it is supposed to be). So, my kind of logic says I need to add something to my first drive's "boot.ini" to link to Win7's BCD, wherever it might be, and if that would even work, and then edit that Win7 BCD to show Win7 on "R" where it (Win7) actually is rather than on the actual "C" where it is not.

I can see all of that clearly, but pictures do not make machines boot!

Anybody wanna get involved?!

But first I will go to the EasyBCD forum and see what the seasoned folks there might have to say.

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leejosepho
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14 Jul 2010, 7:59 am

I know there are some true experts over here ...

http://lounge.windowssecrets.com/index. ... pic=776594

... so I have posted my problem there to see whether any solution is even possible. Re-installing Win7 would fix Win7's dilemma of not knowing where/how to find itself, but I would not even consider that at my expense of losing Debian 5 and its SATA drivers now working for my Win98!

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leejosepho
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14 Jul 2010, 10:58 pm

Debian reigns once again!

EasyBCD did the job ...

http://neosmart.net/forums/showthread.php?t=6725&page=2

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Fuzzy
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14 Jul 2010, 11:02 pm

Great to hear that!

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leejosepho
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15 Jul 2010, 5:28 pm

Ah, now I have again lost access to Debian. I used XP's recovery console to "FIXBOOT C:" and got my 98-2k-XP ("boot.ini") menu back, but now Win7's "repair startup" cannot place a new BCD menu on "C" because of whatever Debian did to my MBR ... but I definitely intend to leave that alone because I can easily live without Win7 and I know my Debian installation is still good and it needs my MBR just as it is and I also do not want to lose Debian's SATA drivers now there for Win98se to also use.

Whew.

I have just printed out some info related to dual-booting Debian alongside XP ...

Does anybody here have experience with doing that?

Debian's installer could not put GRUB on my machine, but it did get LiLo installed to Debian's partition along with whatever else it (the installer) wrote to my MBR. So if I now understand correctly, "bootpart" will let me modify XP's "ntldr" and add Debian into the mix.

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leejosepho
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15 Jul 2010, 6:48 pm

Well! Using "bootpart" was easy and now a "boot.ini" menu entry got me to Debian's "/boot" like it should, but then Debian would not load because I had installed LiLo rather than GRUB in its "/boot" partition ... so I now have a re-installation of Debian running, and this time around I noticed the selection for the 2.6.26-2-amd64 kernel you had mentioned, Orwell, where last time I had not known what to do there and just proceeded with 2.6 ... and now maybe that means GRUB *will* go into Debian's "/boot" this time so the "bootpart" entry I just made (but will now likely need to re-do) in XP's "boot.ini" will be able to actually get Debian started ...! !

The red bar says 19 minutes to go ...

Oh, and this time I also figured out how to set Debian's view of my existing FAT32 "share with Windows" partition so I will not get a permissions error from Debian the next time I attempt to access that partition.

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leejosepho
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15 Jul 2010, 9:15 pm

Okay, yes, some of you told me so, but I am still in a bit of shock!

Either I misunderstood something or the instructions I got along with "bootpart" were incomplete or whatever, so I ended up goofing up and having to do yet another re-installation of Debian ... but this last time the installer acted differently near the end and quite unexpectedly listed all my other operating systems and said it should be safe to just go on ahead and let GRUB handle everything ... and no, my screen is not really that dirty (my camera is goofy) ...

I have absolutely not even the slightest idea how GRUB managed to find Win7 when Win7 could not find itself, but I now have "All systems 'Go!'", and perfectly!

Whew, and now back to getting Debian dialed in ...

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Orwell
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15 Jul 2010, 10:11 pm

Congrats!

Dang, I forgot Lenny was still on Grub-legacy. I'd love to see you trying to hexaboot (or whatever abomination you are setting up on that machine) using Grub 2.

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leejosepho
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15 Jul 2010, 10:36 pm

Orwell wrote:

Congrats!

Dang, I forgot Lenny was still on Grub-legacy. I'd love to see you trying to hexaboot (or whatever abomination you are setting up on that machine) using Grub 2.

Conglomeration, maybe, but no abomination here, my fellow, and GRUB2 is what I had been using (and what had been working quite well) from within EasyBCD until Debian put whatever it did into my MBR. In any case, my initial Mint test left me with having heard something somewhere about staying away from GRUB altogether, but now it sure is getting the job done!

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Fuzzy
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15 Jul 2010, 10:46 pm

leejosepho wrote:

Conglomeration, maybe,

Its a grubian debian gallimaufry of gnu.

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davidred wrote...
I installed Ubuntu once and it completely destroyed my paying relationship with Microsoft.

leejosepho
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16 Jul 2010, 5:47 am

Okay, if you say so, and I do like the sound of that!

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leejosepho
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16 Jul 2010, 7:10 am

DentArthurDent wrote:

BTW Lee I would dearly like to help you, but my level of knowledge re-linux is not much higher than your own. There are however some incredibly knowledgeable linux people on this forum and it would be really nice to see them offering you a little more assistance.

Right now I have a text file of this entire thread I am studying so I can go back and follow the suggestions from Orwell and Fuzzy, but I came here for just a moment to thank you for that thought and to offer at least this "honorable mention" of them! I had missed your comment my first time through.

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leejosepho
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16 Jul 2010, 9:58 am

Orwell wrote:

... be sure to check your '/etc/apt/sources.list' file to make sure it says "lenny" instead of just "stable" or else you'll get a very unexpected large (and potentially disruptive) update in a few months when Squeeze becomes the new "stable."

#
# deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux 5.0.5 _Lenny_ - Official amd64 CD Binary-1 20100626-18:35]/ lenny main
deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux 5.0.5 _Lenny_ - Official amd64 CD Binary-1 20100626-18:35]/ lenny main
deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ lenny main
deb http://security.debian.org/ lenny/updates main
deb http://volatile.debian.org/debian-volatile lenny/volatile main
deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ lenny-proposed-updates main
deb-src http://volatile.debian.org/debian-volatile lenny/volatile main

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