Hi everybody, after a lab period with knopp myth and a PVR-350 I have now bought a new PC and is going to do my final!?! installation.
Previously I've been running "auto install" making a clean installations. Now I would however like to have the possibility to occasionaly boot XP. I've made a 5 gig partition with XP and have been trying to do a manual install (not overwriting the XP installation) on the rest of the disk. No success so far.
Is this possible?

regards
håkan

I am having a similar issue. No matter which instructions I follow, I just can't get dual boot to work with XP. I keep getting the following error "Error Loading Operating System". I don't even get a Lilo prompt or a NT boot loader prompt. This error appears right below the checking DMI pool stuff. Any help would be much apreciated. Here's my setup, if that will help.

P4 3Ghz
1GB PC 3200 Ram
Shuttle SB61G2
Intel 865G MB
120GB HD partitioned with swap, /(EXT3), cache(EXT2), myth(EXT3)
45GB HD partitioned with C(NTFS), E(FAT32)
ATI Radeon 9800 All in Wonder Pro(AGP)
Happaugue PVR 350(PCI)- not installed yet

I think you probably just need to fix the LILO config file and redo LILO. There are some instructions on another thread at this address:

http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=539

I got mine to dual boot, but then when I saw it was working ok, I just did an autoinstall instead and had to folow the instructions to get it working, again. Be sure to edit your lilo.conf file so that the weird extra lines that make LILO choke are gone and you can re-install LILO to the boot sector.

Good luck.

--Skyler

Skyler,

What else are you booting? And what did you install first? I'm one of the (many) people who have a bootable partition already set up and the manual partition is broken. (Permanent loop, can't ever get it to get out of the menus and actually write to the disk). It's the only thing standing between me and Myth right now!

- Jason

Right now I'm booting KnoppMyth and Windows XP. I actually did things a little differently to get my current configuration working, but I had lots of problems with lilo. If these are your problems, you might want to follow the instructions from the link above to get into the writeable filesystem, modify your lilo.conf file to comment out the messed up lines (there is a post in the thread that I linked to about doing this). If you change the lilo.conf then you need to run lilo to write the boot loader again and make sure it doesn't give you any errors.

I'm not sure if this is your problem. It almost sounds like doing a manual install of KnoppMyth has references to wrong partitions or something. Did it give you "kernel panic" errors or anything? I think I got one of those when I was using loadlin from a boot disk and had specified my bootable linux partition incorrectly.

In case it is helpful, I'll explain how I got to my current working dual boot of KnoppMyth and Windows XP. It's a bit of a pain in the @ss, roundabout, and required additional software, but it ended up working.

1. I already had Windows XP installed, so I tried doing a manual install to the extra space on my drive. It didn't work (I think because of lilo problems?) so I made a backup of my Windows XP partition with Drive Image.

2. I did an auto install of KnoppMyth since I figured I didn't really know Linux very well and I didn't know how to get the swap set up and everything. My auto install wiped out my Windows XP, but I didn't really care since I had a backup image of the drive.

3. After getting KnoppMyth working, I got a larger hard drive just for storing video files on. I set it up by following the instructions on this thread: http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=1057.

4. Once I'd installed the larger drive, I no longer needed my old video partition for storing video. I deleted the partition and then restored my backup of Windows XP in its place (so XP was installed in the 4th partition on my first drive). I booted into Linux, modified my /etc/lilo.conf file so show a boot entry for WindowsXP in /dev/hda4. There are some examples (commented out) in the lilo.conf file that will give you the idea of how to create an entry for another operating system.

5. I tried booting XP and got an error that a file was corrupted in <systemroot>\Windows and realized that I hadn't modified my boot.ini file yet to make WindowsXP point at the right partition (since it was partition 1 before and partition 4 now). I went into Linux, mounted my NTFS WindowsXP partition (/dev/hda4) under some random folder name and copied the boot.ini to a floppy disk. (Something like cp boot.ini /floppy.)

6. I then edited my boot.ini file (on the floppy) and changed anywhere that said "partition(1)" to "partition(4)" instead.

7. I pulled the disk out, rebooted my system, and booted off the Windows XP CD. After it loaded a bunch of things, I pushed 'R' to get to a recovery console. I logged into the Administrator account and changed to my root directory (CD \) and copied my boot.ini from my floppy to my WinXP partition. (copy a:\boot.ini c:\). I then typed exit and the system rebooted and both my KnoppMyth and Windows XP partitions were working normally.

There is probably an easier way to do this, but that is how I managed to get it working, but this roundabout way worked for me.

Thanks for the detailed reply to your approach. Definitely not the ideal approach, eh? I'd like to avoid buying more stuff if possible (My wife's not thrilled at the cost so far!) but I will if that's the only option. I also only have one 200 GB HD.

Does anyone have a clue how to install Windows and Knoppmyth peacefully? Or is the only option to take some other Linux distribution and build Myth from scratch? That's a painful path which I've been down before... isn't there a way with Knoppmyth?

- Jason

You can probably get things working on one drive by just changing the way the partitions are created. I don't see any reason that the swap file, the video partition, or the video delay partition need to be primary partitions. I don't know much about Linux, but I would figure that these partitions all could be "logical drives" inside the "extended partition" to use Windows/DOS terminology. I would think that an equivalent concept exists in Linux.

It would be very nice if KnoppMyth set things up that way so that it isn't hogging all the possible primary partitions (there can only be 4 primary partitions as far as I'm aware). I'd rather see the setup create one primary partition and three other "logical" sections within an extended partition. Other booting operating systems usually require a primary partition in order to boot, so the fact that KnoppMyth decides to take them all makes life difficult.

I had a mere 15 GB drive for my boot drive, so doing what I did turns out nicely. It wouldn't work so well on a 200GB drive--plus you'll have problems trying to boot an OS off the end of a drive that big since most BIOSes and MS OSes hate disks past about 130GB in size unless you install special software or all the Service Packs, etc.

Maybe someone else who is more familiar with the intricacies of Linux file systems, partitioning, etc. can explain how you might do this manually.

You might be able to backup the contents of the different partitions, and install KnoppMyth with the default installation. After it installs and works, you might then be able to backup the KnoppMyth Partitions, also, and then delete all but the Linux boot partition. Then create the primary and extended partitions you desire (remember not more than 4 primary partitions per drive) and restore the the previous Windows partition (to a primary partition) and the KnoppMyth swap, video delay and video partitions to an extended partition instead or primary ones. Then you'll probably have to remap the mounting so things point to the right place in Linux (and also change any boot.ini for Windows NT/2000/XP as I mentioned above). Theoretically this should work, but would be lots of work and fun backing things up and restoring them.

Of course you'd want to make the appropriate partitions active, modify lilo and everything once you got everything restored.

It doesn't sound like fun, but it might work.

Good luck.

Skyler,

Thanks for the suggestion. I thought about it, but I decided not to go that route... I have a pretty strong hunch that it wouldn't work. (Or maybe just that I couldn't pull it off?)

Anyway, I've been in contact with Cecil trying to fix the installation script. (It's just a bash script). I've emailed him what I think might be the problems, but I guess Dale is the script guy. No word from Dale in the past week, not looking good.

At this point I'm going to probably move to another distribution that works but I'm going to continue trying to fix this because I think this is the solution I want to recommend to friends. But I also need one that works...

I've included my email at the bottom for any bash script experts who can provide feedback while we wait for Dale to get involved. I'm no Bash and/or Linux expert although I know some other scripting/coding languages.

If you don't have a copy of the actual install script you can email me ("jms" underscore "temp" at "yahoo" dot "com") or Cecil. If I had a web site I would post it...

Here is my email:

syversen,
Did you have any luck tryint to fix this problem?


Thanks

I wrote up what I thought the problem was and sent it to Cecil, who sent it to Dale. That was like 2-3 weeks ago or more. I haven't heard anything, although Cecil recently emailed me and told me Dale was looking at it.

In the mean time I have Fedora Core dual booting great and I'm following Jarod's guide... I'm not going real fast since it's time consuming and I'd prefer to use Knoppmyth but I don't want to wait forever so I'm going down the path. One of them will converge first!

In the mean time, the more people who can let Cecil/Dale know it's an issue the better. Preferably, do so by offering to help fix and/or test the solution!

- Jason