Baslinux mailing list

[James Miller <jamtat AT mailsnare.net>]

On Sat, 10 Dec 2005, Kunle 'bona wrote:

> anyway my harddisk is has 7 partitions and bl3 is installed on and 
> extended partition, presently i boot either with a bl3 boot disk1  or 
> from  dos with the loadlin.exe .. method, so i was wondering if there 
> was any way i could get to boot directly from the harddisk from startup

You have a few choices. Depends to some degree what's on the other 6 
partitions. Safest way would be to create a bootable DOS floppy with 
loadlin, the BL3 kernel and other files needed for booting. Create an 
autoexec.bat that runs boot.bat as soon as DOS fires up from the floppy. 
When you want to boot BL3, reboot, set the computer to boot first from 
floppy, and stick that floppy in the drive. When you want to boot whatever 
else you have, leave the floppy out. Other choices involve installing a 
master boot program or, if you already have a boot program installed (like 
GRUB or maybe LILO), editing its config file and adding an entry for BL3. 
If you alreay have such a master boot program installed, it's relatively 
safe to edit its config, adding an entry for BL3. If you don't have one 
and need to install one, things get more tricky. Since you'll be fooling 
with the mbr by installing it, and since you may not have sufficient 
knowledge to edit it with entries to boot various things that might be on 
your machine, you run a greater risk of screwing up something on your 
system--up to and including effectively hosing all your partitions. 
Proceed at your own risk on this one. If you want to try something like 
that, take a look at Smart Boot Manager (SBM), a free master bootloader 
that can either be installed to the HD or run from a floppy. The floppy 
method allows you to test how effective it will be for your system before 
installing it to the HD. But be aware that you will have to take some 
additional steps, i.e., installing LILO to the root of your BL3 partition, 
before SBM will boot it. That's a tricky maneuver in itself. I think I 
provided instructions for installing LILO to the root of the BL3 
partition, so if you search the archives you may find info about how to do 
it. You could also try creating a GRUB floppy, or simply downloading a 
GRUB floppy image from the 'net, study up on GRUB's workings, and try 
that. If you enter the right values, it should boot BL3 as-is. You can 
then maybe install GRUB to your HD and have it act as your master boot 
loader (look at http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/grub/grub.htm for 
some directions).

On your sound card issue: I believe you told us at some point what chip 
your mobo uses to generate sound. As you may know, there are many 
different brands. A popular one is the Soundblaster brand, but there are 
many others as well. Some of those others, though not Soundblasters, are 
compatible with Soundblaster. But yours may be neither the Soundblaster 
brand, nor a compatible brand. If that's the case, the sound package 
provided for BL3 will _not_ work. It can be a tricky thing getting 
non-Soundblaster cards set up on BL3. So, if you want to get it going, be 
prepared for some research and possibly alot of experimentation.

James