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[sindi keesan <keesan AT SDF.ORG>]

I have several large IDE drives which will not boot to DOS. One of them 
stopped booting to DOS after I formatted and copied lots of files to it. 
It will boot to a DOS floppy and then c: and boot BL from DOS, or boot 
Puppy Linux 4 with loadlin, but not Puppy Linux 5, which usually boots 
with LILO, but LILO would not boot anything on this computer.  (I may have 
goofed, of course.).

I unloaded lilo from sda1 where I put it so as not to conflict with grldr 
in sda (mbr) while I was trying to multi boot Puppy 5 and bl using grub 
and lilo in combination, before I figured out grub.

To boot bl2 or bl3 with grub4dos after some other OS installs grub and 
copies grldr and makes a menu.lst (by default in hda1 which puppy now 
calls sda1):

1.  Put kernel in /boot directory of partition where full basiclinux is 
located, let's assume it is hda5 (first logical partition) with kernel
bzimage.  (I tried putting it in /boot of the first partition, instead 
which did not work).

2.  Add to menu.lst

title BL2  (hda6)
  kernel /boot/bzimage root=/dev/hda6 vga=791 ro

You can put anything you like after title.  Grub4dos shows the location
of the files in parentheses.

Grub4dos adds an unneeded uuid line after the titl.

Do not call it sda6 though later puppy kernels use sda for IDE.

The vga=791 has to come before the ro not on a separate line, and is 
optional.  It gives 1024x786 framebuffer text mode (which also lets you 
use mplayer in framebuffer mode without X, and fbjpeg with lynx or links 
to view images without X.)

For BL3.50 I put rw instead of ro.


I have not tried booting loop BL3 or ramdisk BL2 this way.  Puppy
booted from DOS uses initrd=initrd.gz line.
Probably something like:
title BL2-ramdisk (hda1/bl2)
kernel /bl2/zimage root=/dev/hda1 ro
initrd /bl2/baslinux.gz

The root might not be needed.
BL2-RAM can also boot direct from floppy disks.

Grub4dos appears to find only linuxes with kernels named vmlinuz.
It found an old vmlinuz.s11 (slackware 11) kernel and set up a section
for it which of course did not work since no other files are there.
It did not find any version of BL.

There is a 'Windows' section which boots to DOS on hard drives
with good boot sectors.  On this computer it gets stuck looking in
(hd0,0) for DOS or Windows boot info.

For some reason on this computer, booting BL2 from DOS (after floppy boot 
to DOS) or with grub4dos, I get a screen without the login prompt and with 
some odd looking messages possibly related to memory, but I can switch 
Alt-F3 to a screen which lets me log in.  First and second terminals are 
not usable after I log in but third and fourth are.

BL3 (using my same kernel) boots normally to a login screen.

Steven, why might BL2 not boot to a login screen on the first terminal?

The kernel I compiled only recognizes under 900MB RAM of 2GB present.

This is my newest desktop with an IDE controller and a floppy drive.  BL 
can't handle SATA.

I used to boot one laptop with IDE controller problem and dead floppy 
controller using a DOS boot CD, then switching to C: and booting BL with 
loadlin.  This is simpler, isn't it?


Sindi Keesan