[gentoo-amd64] Re: cant boot off sata disk

[Duncan]

Barry Schwartz <chemoelectric@×××××××××××××.org> posted
20090408230656.GA18637@××××××××××××××××××.org, excerpted below, on  Wed,
08 Apr 2009 18:06:56 -0500:

> When I had a machine dual-booting to MSDOS and Slackware, I used the DOS
> MBR and wrote LILO into the boot record of a Linux partition.

I don't remember what I did back when I was experimenting, 2000 or so, 
but when I decided MS was going with eXPrivacy a way I could not and 
would not follow and thus got serious about Linux, I bought a new drive 
(100 gig), and made it all Linux.  I then set the BIOS boot drive 
selector to the Linux drive and installed LILO to the MBR on it, not at 
that point touching the (much smaller) drive with MS on it.

That way, I could switch the BIOS boot selector to the MS side and it 
would boot it directly, tho I normally kept the BIOS pointed at the Linux 
drive, which had a LILO entry for the MS installation as well.

But once I knew I had to get off MS -- they weren't giving me a lot of 
choice, unless I wanted to pirate it -- I bought a couple good books on 
Linux (Running Linux and Linux in a Nutshell, best recommendations I ever 
got and I continue to recommend them to others today), and within three 
months had learned how to configure and build my own kernel, configure 
and install LILO for booting the MS side so to MS Windows it looked like 
it was the primary drive, and configure xf86config (now xorg.conf) from 
scratch for dual cards, dual graphics drivers, and triple monitors, along 
with trying various desktop environments and choosing KDE, and choosing 
all the apps I was going to use.

That first three months was tough, but once I had everything setup the 
way I wanted/needed it, there was no going back, and the back-from 
MSWormOS was logarithmic, 2 weeks between boots to it, a month, three 
months (by then to sort out stuff to archive and delete a bunch of other 
stuff, to shrink its partitions), six months (to finish arranging things 
to delete the Windows partitions entirely, tho I kept the install files 
around until I went AMD64), no more.

But during that first three months I was still booting MS quite a bit, as 
I was still running OE for mail and news as choosing kmail for mail and 
pan for news were the last main Linux app choices I made and the app 
choices were after I got the hardware setup.  In particular, I was 
getting a bit of help with the switch from folks on my ISP's newsgroups 
-- and using OE to do it.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman