Partition Schizophrenia Booting DOS with GRUB

[C M Reinehr]

Leon A. Goldstein wrote:

> C. M. Reinher wrote:
> 
>> This sounds more like a M$ DOS/Windows problem, than a Linux problem, but
>> a couple of questions come to mind:
>>
>> 1) What tool did you use to set up the partitions?  If you used anything
>> other than a M$ DOS or Windows utility (eg. fdisk), that might be the
>> cause of your problem.
>>
>> 2) Have you tried restoring the master boot record with fdisk & booting
>> DOS
>> natively, rather than through GRUB?  What happens then?
>>
>>
> 
> The HD was partitioned with FDISK as provided with Novell DOS 7 (aka
> DR-DOS).
> The drive boots normally when connected as master, using its own
> bootloader.
> GRUB is not in the MBR of this drive; it is  a slave to another drive,
> wherein GRUB is installed.
> 
> I tried converting the three logical partitions to primary, using
> Partition Magic 6.  This only resulted with the same number of
> superfluous partitions as before, but the sequencing was changed.  I
> restored the partitions back to logical.
> 
> Since the drive performs normally booting from its own DOS bootloader,
> and only goes haywire when booted from GRUB, I'd consider this a
> GRUB/Linux issue.
> 
> --
> Leon A. Goldstein
> Powered by Caldera Linux 2.4
> System 5WV271

Yes & no.  Before you blame your problems on Linux or Grub you should know 
that there are no universal standards governing the way partitions are 
defined and managed.  Different operating systems have different ways of 
doing it. I can't remember where I read it, but a valuable bit of advice is 
to use _only_ the partition tools provided with your operating system. 
Using a partitioning tool from DR-DOS, to creat partitions, managed by a 
third party product to be used for a M$ operating system & booted by a 
Linux boot loader ...  See where this is going?  Before going any further I 
stongly recommend some midnight reading from the Linux Documentation 
Project: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/HOWTO-INDEX/os.html#OSPARTITIONS

Two How-To's in particular you should read:
Filesystems-HOWTO: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Filesystems-HOWTO.html
Partition: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/mini/Partition/index.html
Multiboot-with-GRUB: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/mini/Multiboot-with-GRUB.html

Cheers!

cmr
-- 
Registered Linux User #241964
----
"Do not meddle in the affairs of Wizards, for they are subtle
and quick to anger." -- Samwise Gamgee