From: mcw1@crux2.cit.cornell.edu (Michael C. Williams) Subject: SOLVED! Non-Booting Partition Problem !! Date: 24 Feb 1993 03:27:50 GMT
OK, Here's the situation... You can't get your machine to boot off the hard
drive, but it will do anything else. Here's how I was set up...
80386DX40
4M RAM , 120M IDE hd with on-board controller, AMI BIOS.
I installed Linux the way it says in the INSTALL doc, used the Linux fdisk to
create three partitions 1 - 65M DOS 2 - 5M swap 3 - 50M linux. After I
had everything set up with Linux, I formatted my C: off of a DOS boot disk,
then put all my zipped backups onto it.
My symptoms: I could boot either Linux or DOS off of a floppy, and access
either respective file system. I couldn't get Linux to mount the DOS fs,
but this could have been due to incorrect calling.
TO BOOT OFF OF A DOS PARTITION, YOU MUST USE DOS F-DISK TO CREATE THAT
PARTITION!!!
To fix my problem, I booted DOS off a floppy, then used DOS fdisk to delete my
primary DOS partition. After it was deleted, I recreated the partition, using
all the available space (didn't have to know the numbers - Fdisk left the
other partitions alone). Then I had to reformat with format /s c: and
it all works now. I can boot DOS off the hard drive, and boot Linux off a
floppy.
Next project is to get LILO working before my backup zip files get too out
of date ...... :)
Good luck to all.
Michael
MCW1@crux3.cit.cornell.edu, MCW1@cornell.edu