Both already installed and LILO is the boot loader

This means that you had a Win 2k installation, and you went ahead and installed Linux after that and put LILO on the MBR. Which means you lost the NT boot loader (in some cases, Win 2000 refuses to boot even if you enter the appropriate label at the LILO prompt).

Before you go ahead and remove LILO, make sure you have a Linux boot disk handy, by following the instructions in the previous section. Similarly, follow the next set of instructions to "move" LILO from the MBR to the /boot partition.

Now, boot from a DOS or Win 9x floppy that has fdisk on it. Do a fdisk
/mbr from the floppy and reboot. You should now see the Win 2000 boot-up screen. Follow the instructions give in the first part of this article to use the Linux boot floppy to access the partition and create the boot menu entry. Reboot again and use the menu to boot Linux.

Full power ahead

Now that you have Linux as part of the Windows 2000 boot menu, it’s time to make the boot menu even more powerful.

Install the Recovery Console

The Recovery Console is a "DOS-Mode" type tool for Windows 2000 installations that lets you repair a crashed installation. For details read the article "Disaster Recovery in Windows 2000", (page 131) in this issue.

Choose the default operating system

You can select the default OS to boot into by right-clicking My Computer, and clicking the Startup and Recovery button on the Advanced tab. Select the OS from the list and set the amount of time to wait for user input before starting the default OS.

Add the floppy drive to the boot menu for booting

This lets you boot using the floppy from the boot menu, even if you’ve set the boot sequence to C, A in the BIOS. Use this tip only if you don’t need system security, for example, when playing games is all you do on the PC.

Boot into Linux and issue the command:

dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/tmp/Floppy.bin bs=512 count=1.

Follow the same procedure as setting up the Linux installation. Copy this file into c:\ and add an entry to boot.ini like:

c:\Floppy.bin="Boot Floppy".

The next time you boot, this will appear as a new option. Insert a bootable floppy and select this entry to boot from it.

Accessing NTFS from Linux

Having two operating systems can sometimes be a pain. For example, you create, download, or read a file on one operating system, but when you need to refer to the same file later from a different OS, the only way to do this is to copy the file onto a network or floppy, and then copy it back in the other OS. Slow, inefficient and totally anti-technology. Linux does read and write to Win 9x partitions including FAT32, but when it comes to NTFS, it doesn’t even read them. The solution to this is a kernel-level module you need to compile.

First, download the small archive ntfs-990831.tgz from www.informatik.hu-berlin.de/~loewis/ntfs. This is also available in the Linux section of this month’s CD. Follow these steps to install the module:

tar zxvf ntfs-990831.tgz (Untar the archive)

cd ntfs (Change to the install directory)

fdiskàp (Note the device on which NTFS is loaded)

./configure —enable-device=<NTFS device name> —enable-mount-to=/mnt/nt (Ready the installation configuration)

mkdir /mnt/nt (Create the directory to be used as a mount point)

make (Compile the installation)

make install (Install)

This should typically work. However, a bug in the install script doesn’t complete the process. To complete the setup, do the following:

cd linux21 (Change to this directory)

make mount (Mount the NTFS partition, creates the NTFS module)

This will mount the NTFS partition to /mnt/nt in read-only mode. Although a configuration option exists for making the mount read-write, it didn’t work for me. To make sure that you can mount the NTFS partition anytime, copy the ntfs.o file from the install directory (ntfs) to /lib/modules/2.2.14-12/fs. Then add the line insmod ntfs to the end of /etc/rc.d/rc.local.

To mount the NTFS partition, simply use mount –t ntfs (NTFS device) /mnt/nt. You can explore the directories and copy files to the Linux partition easily. The installation also has a few other tools (like ntcat, ntcopy, ntdir, etc) that let you use the NTFS partition, without mounting it. If anyone has success in enabling write access, do let me know too.

Accessing Ext2fs from Windows 2000

This is much easier to set up. All you need to do is download the ZIP archive http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/explore2fs-1.00-pre3.zip. (also on this month’s CD). Extract and run the single EXE in it. It gives you an Explorer look-alike that reads the Linux partition(s) on your drive, and lets you browse the directories and copy files out. An option lets you enable write-access too.

Hopefully, this article would have helped you not only in letting Win 2000 be the boot choice, but also in understanding how the boot process works. Do let me know about your experiences.

Vinod Unny is with iSquare Technologies