>Maybe you should install LI(LO) not in the master boot record but in the boot
>record of your Linux root partition which should then an active one. Ask the
>manual of LILO how to do that ...
While I'm no expert with NT's MBR signature information, I could
help out with a good solution to multibooting Linux using NTLDR. The first
step is to create a 512-byte file which will hold the bootsector. This
file needs to be placed on the WinNT system partition, e.g. C:\. Of
course, the system partition must be FAT as Linux does not yet have
full NTFS support. The command is:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/boot/bootsect.lnx bs=512 count=1
of course, substituting /mnt/boot with your WinNT system partition mount
point. Then, arrange LILO to write the bootsector to this file. I have
this in my /etc/lilo.conf:
> boot=/mnt/boot/bootsect.lnx
> map=/boot/map
> install=/boot/boot.b
> prompt
> timeout=300
> message=/etc/lilo.message
<...etc...etc...>
The important line in the file is "boot=/mnt/boot/bootsect.lnx", where
/mnt/boot is the location of my WinNT system partition. Just re-run
LILO to write the new data into this bootsector file.
Finally, you need to convince NTLDR to chain-load Linux via the
bootsector data. In order to do this, you need to edit BOOT.INI and
include the extra information for Linux. Here's my BOOT.INI:
> [boot loader]
> timeout=30
> default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINNT
> [operating systems]
> multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINNT="Windows NT Workstation"
> C:\BOOTSECT.LNX="Red Hat Linux Version 3.0.3"
As you see, the last line points to the bootsect.lnx that was
previously created. NT should now happily boot Linux.
Maybe someone should put this stuff in a Mini-HOWTO, since this
is becoming a FAQ.
>Werner
--Arthur