[TriLUG] Laptop installation question

[Joseph Mack NA3T]

On Fri, 24 Feb 2006, Christopher Blackmon wrote:

> I've already tried that... if I install grub or some
> other boot manager into the boot partition.. my laptop
> thinks something is wrong and forces a system restore
> as soon as I try to boot into windows.

yow.

My thinkpads required me to go into the bios and set a hard 
to find flag with a name that had no apparent connection to 
multibooting. I found the info on the IBM website after 
googling for multiboot my_brand my_model_number.

It sounds like you have grub setup OK but FYI below is my 
menu.lst. I run this off a floppy before I attempt to get 
the machine to boot off its own mbr (or if the mbr is 
hosed). Make sure you verify that you get the same behaviour 
(forcing a system restore) with a boot floppy to show that 
it's not a problem with your harddisk mbr.

For your sanity you should copy the mbr of a disk before 
messing with it, incase you need to restore it. You may be 
too late this time, but make sure you make a copy of the new 
mbr after it's working

dd if=/dev/hda of=my_machine_name.mbr count=1 bs=512

The first 443 bytes are the actual mbr. The rest is the 
partition table. If you've messed with the partition table, 
to restore you do

dd if=my_machine_name.mbr of=/dev/hda count=1 bs=443

If you want more info google for 443 and mbr.

Joe
-----------------------------
# /boot/grub/menu.lst Apr 2001

timeout 5
# Fallback to the second entry.
fallback 1

color light-green/brown blink-red/blue

# Linux

title  linux-2.6.13
kernel (hd0,2)/boot/bzImage-2.6.13 ro root=/dev/hda3

title  linux-2.4.28
kernel (hd0,2)/boot/bzImage-2.4.28 ro root=/dev/hda3

# For booting NT, W95, W98, W2K (others untested)
# if Win isn't on the first partition
# you have a lot more work to do.
title W98
root        (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1
# For loading DOS if Windows NT is installed
# chainload /bootsect.dos
#---------------------------------


-- 
Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant map
generator at http://www.wm7d.net/azproj.shtml 
Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux!