[ILUG] Multi boot on Multi disk

[Alan Sobey]

>I have a dual disk system with the primary IDE and secondary SCSI. The IDE
drive has NT on it.
>The plan now is to install SuSE and Solaris on the SCSI.
>
>I do not want multiple boot managers installed nor do I want to change the
boot sequence in
>the BIOS each time I decide to choose a different OS. How do I install this
setup?
>
>This system will remain primarily an NT system.
>
>I appreciate any experiences you would share in this setup.

By the sounds of it you really don't want to jeapordise your NT
installation.
The following method is what I use for booting win98, winnt & RH6.0.
It should work for SuSE & Solaris too, though I have no experience of this.

**NB** I take no responsibility if you do mess-up your system.
Having said that, it works fine for me.

The plan is to install the OSes as usual, but instead of writing to the
Master Boot
Record of the Primary hard drive (which is the usual practice for any OS -
AFAIK)
you write to the Master Boot Record of a floppy (if you're especially
paranoid about
damaging your current setup) or to the Partition Boot Record of the
partition you're
installing to (which AFAIK must be a primary partition.)  After the
installation(s) you
can capture the the MBR from the floppy to a file (only 512 bytes I) and
reference
that file in NT's boot loader (by editing the boot.ini file).  I presume the
installers for
SuSE and Solaris allow you specify where to install the Boot Record and/or
create a
boot-up floppy.  I used to use a freeware dos program called bootsect to
transfer the
boot record to a file or you could use the linux dd program:

dd if=/dev/fd0 of=~/SuSE.mbr bs=512  count=1

The next step is to copy the mbr file to somewhere that NT can find it on
bootup (c:\ )
and reference it in the c:\boot.ini file.  Have a look at the MS Knowledge
base to learn
about the format of c:\boot.ini if neccessary.
An easier solution may be to use bootpart, another freeware dos program
(which
should work from a dos bootup floppy) which automates the MBR capture and
editing of c:\boot.ini) http://www.winimage.com/bootpart.htm
I strongly advise that you read up on the documentation and maybe follow-up
on the
documentation links at the site.  Btw, I just discovered there a Linux
mini-HOWTO on this
subject (NT OS Loader + Linux mini-HOWTO at
http://sunsite.unc.edu/LDP/HOWTO/mini/Linux+NT-Loader.html
Also if you find the program bootsect.exe (I can't remember where the URL
is) the
documentation and links there are very useful.

I strongly recommend that you read up on this before you begin.  Obviously
it's more
difficult to fix any mistakes afterwards if your computer won't boot  :)
It may be worth printing out some/all documentation just to have a hard copy
if you don't
have another computer to hand.

Hope this helps,
Alan.

P.S.  I just had a brief look at the mini-HOWTO.  I should have just pointed
you towards
that in the first place.  :)