Bt4 dual boot tutorial

[purehate]

if your in chroot you wont have a gui so there is no way you sre editing the correct file with kate. When you run the chroot command you have to use a console text editor in order to edit the lilo file otherwise you are just editing the live cd.

[custode]

Nano works fine for me for editing. Is the panic message in my last post helpful at all for diagnosing what might be going wrong? I tried making the boot partition at location 1 on the drive, but got the same results...

[KMDave]

Did you make sure, that you are using the right partition numbers?

You can check the partition numbers using fdisk.

[custode]

Here's my whole history of partition usage:
Originally, my machine had partition 1 as an EISA partition, 2 as Vista, then some freespace into which I made 3 and 4 (skipping the swap). Result: panic

Then I deleted the EISA partition, but found I could not combine that space into the vista partition, so tried:
a) ignoring that space, and creating all three partitions in the freespace per the install guide. Result: panic
b) creating the boot partition in the 1-x area of the disk, then the swap and main in the space behind vista. Result: panic

I am also having a problem reconciling the sda/sdb when booting from usb, and then writing the lilo.conf. I've tried both way, but with no success. Specifically, when I boot, the HDD becomes sdb, but I know upon boot w/o usb, it'll be sda, so I don't know how to properly edit lilo to look in the right place, however, so far it doesn't seem to matter, I get a panic either way.

[KMDave]

That's ok, but you didn't answer my question.

Did you check out, which partitions you have, like which primary and logical ones?

[custode]

So far all partitions have been primaries. I did once try making a single extended partition into which I made three logical paritions, and got the same result (also, I first tried just making the logical boot partition bootable, then also tried making the entire extended partition bootable, but no change)

[KMDave]

How about checking the output of fdisk -l ?

That would help to help you.

[custode]

At what point? Before I begin there is just the one partition (vista) but it does not begin on cylinder 1.

Then depending on which particular (unsucessful) route of install, I have different results, so would like to report the most helpful version. Thanks for your interest and help.

also, when I do 'lilo -v' I do get two warnings:
Warning: LBA32 addressing assumed

and

Warning: /dev/sdb is not on the first disk

that second one does concern me, but if I change it to sda, I get:
Warning: The boot sector and map file are on different disks
Fatal: Illegal 'root=' specification: /dev/sda7

[KMDave]

Well just issue the fdisk -l and post the output with your vista partition in place.
Then we can have a look where to go from there on.

[custode]

Here is the result after trying to create an extended partition and making logicals inside:

/dev/sdb2 * 196 6533 50900540 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sdb3 6534 7296 6138797+ 5 Extended
/dev/sdb5 * 6534 6542 72261 83 Linux
/dev/sdb6 6543 6674 1060258+ 82 Linux swap/Solaris
/dev/sdb7 6675 7296 4996183+ 83 Linux

fyi, this resulted in panic, with same failure, but now at (8,23) instead of (8,20)