I decided to use a 120GB IDE hard disk for my white box. I want to install OPENSTEP 4.2 and Windows NT 4.0 on the same drive. I have a few questions:
1) How should I maximize partition space for both OS and NT? IDE limit is 2GB, 4GB or 8GB? What about UserPatch4 IDE limit? Should I work with only the 4 primary partitions, or can I use more?
2) What is the installation sequence I should follow?
3) What bootloader should I use to select the system to boot from? Is there any special configuration needed?
For the third question I did have a short-lived multiboot setup some years ago with Windows 2000, OS4.2 and I think BeOS.
It's possible to use the NT bootloader to boot OS4.2. You need to extract the bootsector (the first 512 bytes) from the OS4.2 install floppy and save it as a file on the root of the NT drive. You can then link to this bootsector in the NT boot.ini file. Instructions on how to do it (for Linux) can be found here (
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Linux+NT-Loader-6.html).
With this in mind I would install OS first and then NT (as NT will overwrite the drive MBR with it's own bootloader).
Quote from: "protocol7"For the third question I did have a short-lived multiboot setup some years ago with Windows 2000, OS4.2 and I think BeOS.
It's possible to use the NT bootloader to boot OS4.2. You need to extract the bootsector (the first 512 bytes) from the OS4.2 install floppy and save it as a file on the root of the NT drive. You can then link to this bootsector in the NT boot.ini file. Instructions on how to do it (for Linux) can be found here (http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Linux+NT-Loader-6.html).
With this in mind I would install OS first and then NT (as NT will overwrite the drive MBR with it's own bootloader).
Okie... I did just that and it choked with this message:
OPENSTEP boot1 v40.13.1
.Read error
I believe what we need is boot0 and not boot1. I used the OS4.2 install boot disk and ran 'dd if=a:\ of=os42bs.img bs=512 count=1'.
My hard disk has two partitions, 1st is 4GB large with OS4.2 installed, and 2nd is 14GB for Windows 2000. Do I have to specify and disk parameters?
Solved it using OPENSTEP's bootloader... I simply replaced NT's bootloader with the following commands:
1) boot using OS42 floppy disk and OS42 User CD into *SINGLE* user mode.
2) at the prompt, I typed:
disk -B0 /usr/standalone/i386/boot0 /dev/rsd0a
3) reboot. Now I type 'n' to boot into OS42 and 'd' for DOS.
But for learning sake, I would have to use 'boot0' in NT's boot.ini right?
It's a while since I did this but boot1 sounds correct. It shows boot0 when booting a floppy, but when used to chain-boot a hard disk partition it will show boot1.
I'm pretty sure just adding C:\os42bs.img="OPENSTEP" in boot.ini should have worked.
Unless it might have been an issue with partition sizes, but I'm not sure. Thinking back I believe the partition has to be active and primary (logical partitions can't be booted). You probably could have also used that boot0 file instead of extracting the bootsector from a floppy.
What matters though is that you have it working.