Dual booting win2000 server and linux

[sumthinelse]

I have 2 machines. Each has only 1 hard drive. One is an old cheap one, the new one I built with a new ASUS Athlon motherboard. The old one has a 9G win95 C: partition at the start of the drive. The new one has Win2000 Server installed, with an 8G C: partition at the start of the drive. I installed Suse 8.1 on both, in each case beyond 1024 cylinders from the start of the drive. Linux boots from Grub (boot manager like Lilo) on the old machine but not the new one. On the new one I can select linux from the boot manager menu but when I try to start it it:

Linux-bzimage setup=0x1400 size=10aab8

Error 28: Selected item cannot fit into memory.

Press any key.

But I can boot win2k server with no problems from the Grub menu.

This a very new motherboard, with Phoenix BIOS ev 1004/AA so the Linux boot partition should not have to start in the first 1024 cylinders. But I could resinstall win2k server on a 6G partition (less than 1024 cylinders) and put the Linux boot partition immediately after that.

Maybe Linux (Grub) misidentifies the BIOS and thinks it's too old to boot past 1024 cylinders?

Another strange phenomenon: When I try to run Partition Magic it stops with a message that says that it can't run on a disk with winnt/win2k/winxp server on it!

Has anybody had an experience like this?

 

[sumthinelse]

I looked at the PowerQuest website and it said that Partition Magic does not support windows server products -- only supports windows workstations. They do make a $700 product that is supposed to work with servers -- cough! cough!

What is special about server partitions? Do they use a different kind of ntfs?

 

[Padma]

Well, I'm planning to install Mandrake Linux 9.0 on my new Win2K-Pro machine. 80G drive, so I guarantee I will be installing it beyond cylinder 1024. I'll let you know what happens.

As for Partition Magic, I would guess they use the following "logic": Servers are a business tool. (After all, nobody with a home network would ever install Win2K Server. ) Therefore, since we can identify Server vs Workstation, we will charge a "business" price for the Server tool.

 

[sumthinelse]

Originally posted by Padma
Well, I'm planning to install Mandrake Linux 9.0 on my new Win2K-Pro machine. 80G drive, so I guarantee I will be installing it beyond cylinder 1024. I'll let you know what happens.

Some machines seem to have this 1024 cylinder problem and others don't. On machines that do have this 1024 cylinder limitation, you can still use the whole hard drive, but the /boot mount point would have to be in the first 1024 cylinders. If you haven't installed win2k yet, you could make its C: drive small (6G) and make an extended partition for installing apps etc. Anyway, if you have a 40G C: drive it makes it much harder to back it up via Ghost or Drive Image.

You may be right about the server pricing.

 

[sumthinelse]

I solved the problem. This was a Grub (Grub boot manager) problem, where Grub was miscalculating the amount of memory available. This happens on some systems and not on others -- this is the only time I have ever seen this bug -- it does not happen on my 2 other systems. The workaround is to use Lilo instead of Grub. Red Hat users probably won't have this problem because RH's default boot manager is Lilo.

 

[Padma]

Okay, yeah. I routinely use Lilo myself, so I wouldn't have noticed it.