How to boot from a secondary hard drive from Knoppix?

[Leon Goldstein]

Bill Davidson wrote:
<snip>

>> Boot up Knoppix, check how Knoppix identifies your drives by looking at
>> the properties of the drive/partition icons.  Next, open a terminal and
>> obtain Knoppix root privileges with the command: sudo su
>> Then command changeroot /dev/hdbX  (where X is the partition you want to
>> work in).
>> 
>> SORRY:  that should be chroot, not changeroot.
>  
>

>You need to mount it first. AFAIK you can't chroot into a raw device.

I mentioned checking the Knoppix desktop icon for the properties of the partition of interest.
If it is there, it is mounted, isn't it?

I'm no Knoppix guru; I did have occasion to use this dodge recently when I needed to reinstall GRUB on a Linux/FreeBSD drive. The real trick is running Knoppix as root.

>Also, if you want to boot into your system(not from knoppix), you could edit
>lilo.conf and change the boot option to "boot=/dev/fd0" and install lilo onto
>a floppy.

>At least I think that's how it's done. HTH.

That did not work in my particular case, although I made a GRUB floppy.  The particular problem was related to the old Quantum Bigfoot drive that the BIOS maps as CHS rather than LBA.  CFDISK shows some unused space before and after the FreeBSD slice, and that apparently confuses GRUB in this particular configuration. I had installed FreeBSD first and used its multi-OS bootloader.  Then I installed Linux (without GRUB) and the FreeBSD bootloader went nuts.  (I have no such problem on another system using a Promise ATA100 IDE card and a ATA100 drive.)  Anyhow, I reinstalled, using Linux (Libranet) in the first partition, then installing FreeBSD.  Now GRUB chainloads FreeBSD just fine.



Leon A. Goldstein

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