[plug] Help please

Steve Grasso steveg at calm.wa.gov.au
Tue Oct 3 13:33:43 WST 2000


> I've now got 2 problems and I'm hoping someone can help me.
> 1. Since the reinstall of Win98 it will not recognise my 2nd CD ROM 
> (burner) on bootup. If I go into Control Pane, Add New Hardware Windows 
> will recognise the burner and makes it available but only until I next 
> reboot. Any ideas on how I can get Windows to automatically recognise the 
> burner every time I boot?

Possible kludgy fix (which works for errant CD-ROMs -- don't know about
burners) is to install the CD in "real mode". Use autoexec.bat and config.sys
from the Win98 boot-floppy as templates for loading the drivers needed from
autoexec and config.sys on C-Drive

> 
> 2. When I reinstall Mandrake 7.1 how do I leave my C drive alone and only 
> configure the D drive as my Linux drive?
> 

One way to accomplish this is to go through the Mandrake install process, and
when you get to the Boot Loader section, elect to NOT install any boot-loader
(LILO or GRUB). Instead, use your newly-created boot-floppy, or loadlin from
your Windows C-Drive (hda) to load up your Linux disk (loadlin is in the
dosutils directory on the first Mandrake 7.1 CD). This way, nothing will be
written to the HDD containing your Windows installation. Also, although it
should be selected by default, be sure that Linear mode -- or Logical Block
Addressing (LBA) is specified in relation to your Linux disk during the
install process.

Quick-tips for using loadlin:
-- the detail is from a loadlin installation for a Win95/Mandrake 7.0 dual-boot
machine here in the office

1.  Boot into Linux from your newly-created Mandrake boot-floppy
2.  As root, put a blank floppy, formatted for DOS, into the floppy drive and
mount it using mount -t vfat /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy
3.  Copy /boot/vmlinuz-2.2.15-4mdk to /mnt/floppy (should be around 620kb)
4.  unmount the floppy using umount /mnt/floppy
5.  Boot into Windows
6. Create a directory called loadlin
7. Copy loadlin.exe and vmlinuz-2.2.15-4mdk to c:\loadlin
8.  Copy vmlinuz-2.2.15-4mdk to a file called zimage
9. Create a linux.bat file containing something like the following:

-x----- linux.bat --- start
rem  First, ensure any unwritten disk buffers are flushed:
smartdrv /C
 
rem  Start the LOADLIN process:
c:\loadlin\loadlin  c:\loadlin\zimage  root=/dev/hdd5  ro  mem=128M
-x----- linux.bat --- end

(NOTES:  mem=128M is used to specify 128MB of RAM to Linux -- and the root
partition of the Linux installation was at hdd5 -- your setup may be different)

To boot into Linux, either use the boot-floppy, or from c:\loadlin (under
DOS-mode) type linux

Regards,
Steve



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