How do you make a partition bootable?

[boblucci]

i have a spare box that i'm dual booting win2k and slack 8.0. right now i have to boot in to slack with a boot disk because when i choose "linux" from the nt bootloader it fills the screen with 010101010101.
( i have 2 hard drives )

I was reading in some help file that lilo needs to be installed on hdb1 and that partition needs to be made bootable.

So i go through the "setup" in slack and reconfigure my install i put lilo on the / partition.

i ran this command "dd if=/dev/hdb1 of=/mnt/floppy/bootsect.lin bs=512 count=1"

i took the boosect.lin file i just created and copied it to my c:\ and added C:\bootsect.lin to my boot.ini file in win2k .

And here i am booting from a floppy :-/ What am i doing wrong?

[noblestknight]

I dont know how to do it the way you are trying, but you can just create a 50 MB /boot partition on hda and install LILO there and have it boot w2k. It would probably be easier.

[boblucci]

http://www.anandtech.com/guides/viewfaq.html?i=58

This is what i'm going by.

[binary_boy]

I just use fdisk.

fdisk /dev/hdb1

then hit "m" for the list of options, and the "a" option toggles a partition bootable.

[Feztaa]

I prefer cfdisk, it has an interface, as opposed to fdisk's plain old commandline.

Anyway, in cfdisk, just select the partition you want with the up/down arrow keys, then select the "bootable" option with the left/right arrow keys, then press the enter key - and voila, the partition is bootable

[cheeves]

I couldn't ever get the slack lilo utility to work correctly so I just manually edited /etc/lilo.conf. It kept trying to make me boot from /dev/hda which is my cdrom drive, and wouldn't let me use /dev/mbr. so what i did was change it in /etc/lilo.conf using vim and now it works great. I think there were some other minor complications with the lilo config utility, I would just try editing it manually.

I don't know much about booting win2k, just win98 and before.

[boblucci]

Binary and fez , thank you that is what i was looking for

[boblucci]

alright guys that didnt work!!!

i did cfdisk /dev/hda and removed to boot option from it and the did cfdisk /dev/hdb and but the boot option on it .

i installed lilo in the mbr of /dev/hda and it still gave me 01010101010101 all down the screen!!!! WTF!!!!

[stryder144]

alright guys that didnt work!!!

i did cfdisk /dev/hda and removed to boot option from it and the did cfdisk /dev/hdb and but the boot option on it .

i installed lilo in the mbr of /dev/hda and it still gave me 01010101010101 all down the screen!!!! *WTF!!!!

Here is an idea: go to http://www.xosl.org and pick up the xosl program. It will allow you to boot a bunch of oses and such. I have used it to dual boot win98/winnt. winnt was on the second hdd. I simply went into my bios and turned hda off and loaded winnt onto the hdc. Once I got winnt setup and booting, I changed the bios back and loaded xosl. It allows you to bypass the bios and boot from a second hard drive. It can run lilo or ntloader or what ever. I hope you get where I am going with this. Just substitute linux for winnt in this example. Unfortunately, I think you will still need to have a dos boot partition in order to run xosl. It is pretty sweet overall. Check it out.

[cheeves]

what does your /etc/lilo.conf look like? Is lba32 enabled?