LILO booting off second IDE disk 1101

Brad snip

I may be wrong here, but IMHO what the BIOS does when you boot off your second HD, is tell software your second disk is really the first. So now: Slave == hda (0x80) Master == hdb (0x81) hdc-hdd are not affected. So, if we name your current master DiskM and your current slave DISKS, the process you should use is this:

1. Setup hda (DiskM) normally.

2. Remove DiskM (or use its jumper switches to set it up for slave,) and connect DiskS as master (or set it from slave to master,) and thus change it from hdb to hda.

3. Setup hda (DiskS) normally (that is, set it up as the first disk, hda, ignore the fact it is going to be changed back to hdb later on.)

4. Once you have DiskS setup and everything works as intended, change it back to primary slave (hdb) and reinstall DiskM as primary master (hda). Now things should work as you want: when you change the boot order from BIOS you will be changing the disk you select to hda, and work as if it had been connected to the primary channel as master.

Note that as far as Linux is concerned, you can have it run from any disk, but you cannot change the disk on which its parbreastions reside: if etc-fstab says hda2 is swap, it will try to mount whatever is currentlydev-hda2 as swap. Having your second Linux installation on hdd is OK, since that does not change.

Windows 98 would want to run from hda (0x80), so you can run it only if it is on the disk you have set as first from the BIOS. Win2K-XP would run from other disks, but they should want to know which disk they are on. Win2K (and I buttume XP too, though I never tried it,) can see through BIOS mappings, so this should be no problem, just tell LILO where to find it with current BIOS mapping Do not swap disks in hardware after installing W2k-XP or they will not run.

As always, backup any valuable data first. I make no guarantees about any of the above.

HTH.

Michael