grub boot manager

[Bruce B]

Windows 95b AKA OSR2 will support FAT32 and even has a utility to convert FAT16 to FAT32

Apparently you aren't wanting to just delete Windows - hmmm.

Here is a plan: Due to the fact that you are so low on disk space I'd recommend running Puppy from CD-ROM in order to have a PUP001 file closer to 125 MB, which is still a little small.

If you have the B version of Windows you can convert your drive.

If you don't have the B version and still want to keep Windows - things can get tricky because you will need to create a Linux or FAT32 file system for PUP001.

Presuming you have the A version of Windows. Problems here because it won't run on FAT32 - even the DOS won't run. Following is what you could do.

1) Defrag the drive to move all files to the font of the drive. Use the included DEFRAG program for this.

2) Use Partition Magic (or System Rescue's QTParted clone) and resize the drive to make free space at the end of the drive. These tools should be able to move the files to the front of the drive but probably best to let DEFRAG to it. Six of one and half a dozen of the other I guess.

3) After making enough free space for PUP001, you won't have free space on the Windows partition. You might want to compress the drive using Microsoft's included DoubleSpace or DriveSpace. I forgot what it is called exactly. The compressed Windows partiton will free up about 40 percent of the space on this partition. One problem solved.

4) After compressing the Windows partition (if you wish to do it) then make your FAT32 or Ext2 partition from the freespace. Some utilities will NOT make a FAT32 partition under 520 MB. FDISK won't do it without some kind of trick. I am pretty sure that Partition Magic will do it on a 125 MB partition. I don't know about SystemRescue CD. You could also make an Ext2 partition.

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After you come to the decision that you really can do without Windows, you can dedicate the majority of drive space to Puppy. I think with only 128 MB RAM it would be nice to have a Linux swap partition also, but we can't make one now because we don't really even have enough space for the default PUP001

[babbs]

Although I considered starting a new thread to post my success, I figured that someone could tidy this up some and add the right words to put it on the wiki.

Situation:
* Desktop system with two hard drives, each 20GB. The first drive contained Windows ME. The second drive was added to the system and Fedora Core 3 (FC3) was installed on it. During the FC3 install, grub was installed to the second drive ("/boot" partition at 100MB) with the Master Boot Record (MBR) on the first drive modified to look at the the "/boot" partition on the second drive to run grub.
* During a failed attempt to resize the Windows partition, Windows was damaged and required me to reinstall it if I was to make it work again. I chose to dump Windows for good and deleted the Windows partition. I then partitioned the, now blank, Windows drive into 4 partitions with each being just under 5GB each.
* I installed Puppy Linux 1.0.2-Opera to the first partition of the first drive, but since I already had grub installed, I skipped that part of the Puppy install. (I you already have a working copy of grub installed, it is supposed to be easier to modify the configuration file than to reinstall it.)
* At this point, my fun really began because all of the documentation that I found assumed that grub was installed to the first bootable drive. Mine was installed to the second drive. Due to the limited size of the MBRs on drives used in PCs, grub is installed in two parts (stage 1 and stage 2). Stage 1 is just a pointer to stage 2 where the real work is done. Typically, both stages are on the same drive, but not always.

After trying as many different ways of configuring the grub configuration file (/boot/grub/grub.conf), and running into brick walls with each attempt, I found help here.

* Bruce B - Thank you for your patience. Had I understood your first attempt to help me, I wouldn't have had the problems I did. The confusion was mine. I didn't realize that Puppy also created a "/boot" directory. Thank you for sticking it out with me to get this working! (I am sorry for having such a hard head.)

* The Guest who then attempted to help - Even though I couldn't get your code to work for me, thank you for responding.

* Ian - I couldn't mount the drive from my FC3 user login (the one I browse the web from) to see if there was a Puppy /boot directory. I tried to read the wiki page, but it seems to assume that grub is being installed for the first time.

Success:
Here is what my working grub.conf file now looks like:

Code: Select all

# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE:  You have a /boot partition.  This means that
#          all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg.
#          root (hd1,0)
#          kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/hdc2
#          initrd /initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/hda
default=1
fallback=0
timeout=5
splashimage=(hd1,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
password --md5 {Removed}
title Fedora Core (2.6.11-1.14_FC3)
	root (hd1,0)
	kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.11-1.14_FC3 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet
	initrd /initrd-2.6.11-1.14_FC3.img
title Puppy Linux (v1.0.2 Opera)
	rootnoverify (hd0,0)
	kernel (hd0,0)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda1
title Puppy Linux (v1.0.2 Mozilla)
	rootnoverify (hd0,1)
	kernel (hd0,1)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda2
 

I hope this helps someone along the way.