[techtalk] Dual boot machine

[Conor Daly]

On Wed, Mar 21, 2001 at 05:17:58PM +1100 or so it is rumoured hereabouts, 
Mary Gardiner thought:
> On Tue, Mar 20, 2001 at 09:43:57PM -0600, Vinnie wrote:
> > 
> > ick. loadlin :) (yeah, that's just personal prejudice, I know..but I don't
> > like loadlin at all, I havne't met anything I can't do with lilo, yet)
> 
> Last time I used loadlin (happens after a Windows reinstall, because
> Windows rewrites the MBR) it is as much trouble as dual booting, since
> you have to boot the machine into MS-DOS to run it, deal with not having
> Tab complete, and then wait for it to reboot into Linux.
> 
> Lilo is actually one less boot. Unless I had an old versin of loadlin.
> The graphical loadlin wrapper Winux used to be OK, but the site has gone
> down.
> 
I used loadlin to fire up Corel "Linux in a filesystem image on a FAT
partition".  I'm not sure if it was possible to use lilo here but I
avoided the double-boot problem by using the MS-DOS config.sys menu
functions.  Using such menus, at boot time, before anything happens, you
get presented with a menu which will run different options in the
config.sys and autoexec.bat depending on your choice.  Timeouts and
default choices are supported.  My Corel linux entry loads nothing in
config.sys and directs autoexec.bat to fire up the loadlin batch file so
the DOS boot bit takes all of oh, 5 seconds before the linux boot starts.

config.sys menu useage examples are available on request.

Conor
-- 
Conor Daly <conor.daly at oceanfree.net>

Domestic Sysadmin :-)
---------------------
Faenor.cod.ie
 12:03am  up 22 days, 10:38,  0 users,  load average: 0.08, 0.02, 0.01

Hobbiton.cod.ie
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