On Tue, 13 Nov 2001, John J. Boyer wrote: > I don't want to do anything to the C drive, least of all > writing in the boot record. I just want the D drive to have a > complete Linux system. Here's the partition table for my so called "C:" drive: Partitioning info (fdisk -l /dev/hdb): Disk /dev/hdb: 12 heads, 35 sectors, 989 cylinders Units = cylinders of 420 * 512 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hdb4 1 988 207462+ 6 FAT16 This means that windoze is on partition 4 of my hdb (2nd) hard drive (and in this case, the only partition on that little drive). So you see, the "C:" designation is just a legacy M$ way of labeling a partition on your hard drive, an awkward one, if you ask me. The MBR (Master Boot Record) where a previous poster told you to put lilo, is a small sector outside any partition on the first drive, and is not part of any operating system, including MS-WIN9x,2000, or linux. The MBR is reserved for the installation of a boot loader: lilo is a far more capable, and versatile boot loader than the usual M$ junk (note that it is able to make my second drive appear to be first, when booting win9x); there are at least three other boot loaders in common use with linux. There are also boot sectors available on each partition, which can be used, if you make that partition boot active, or tell your BIOS to boot from that partition (in the case of more recent BIOS versions). I prefer to put lilo on the boot sector of the linux root partition, which can be just about anywhere (currently hdc2, in my case), if the bios will support it, or, if not, another linux partition, and activate the boot flag for that partition. That way, ill behaved viral M$ installation software can't make linux unbootable. All I have to do if MS-Windoze changes the boot flag, is to change it back to the proper partition. But that is just a matter of preference. > I understand that I can start it with loadlin after my system > boots to dos in the normal way from the C drive. Often newbies do prefer to use loadlin, till they get greater confidence and understanding, but that has it's drawbacks, including the fact that the grossly inferior M$ FAT filesystems, with their characteristic fragmentation problems, can easily lead to an unbootable system. I suggest you make sure that you you have at least 2 methods of booting, including a floppy for emergencies, and that you also learn to use one of the rescue disk schemes available. -- L. C. Robinson reply to no_spam+munged_lcr@onewest.net.invalid People buy MicroShaft for compatibility, but get incompatibility and instability instead. This is award winning "innovation". Find out how MS holds your data hostage with "The *Lens*"; see "CyberSnare" at http://www.netaction.org/msoft/cybersnare.html