Dual Booting

[AceFireball]

My friend has windows 2000 on his system and installed red hat to dual boot. When he starts up his comp it only shows red hat, what does he type to get windows to show up, it is definately on his system because he dual booted with both before, but the problem just now started. Any help for him??

[AceFireball]

Cmon guys anyone know? He cant even start his computer.

[The Dude]

Look for a bootini file in the root of the c: drive. I dual boot 2k and xp, Here is what mine looks like. If you want time to chose the timeout=X needs to something other than zero, I think it is seconds until it goes to what's in the default line. Sorry I can't be of more help.
EDIT: partition(1) is my c: drive and WINNT is the directory that windows is in, partition(2) is my second partition on c: or D: and WINDOWS is the directory

[boot loader]
timeout=0
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect

[HawaiianGhost]

Sounds like Linux (Red Hat) "overwrote" the Main Boot Record or MBR. Win XP Pro was doin' that to be before, until I installed a OS controlling prog called System Commander v7.05 (SC7) by Vcomm. SC7 helped me "hide" other OS's & their respective boot partitions to install a new OS so it wouldn't overwrite the MBR. Keep in mind OEM versions of OS's tend to do this a lot.

The only suggestion(s) that I have is to see if you can find the boot.ini file figure out what line was changed and restore it to it's original state. Most times there is a backup of this file to restore from but we are talking about Linux which might have gotten rid of it and put its own MBR in it's place.

If this is not possible, then the other suggestion is to backup any and all doc's/files you/your friend needs to a CD and fdisk/reformat the drive into one primary partition and one extended partition with appropriate sized logical drives. Re-Install Win2000 "First" in the primary partition. Then install Linux Red Hat in the designated "logical" drives. When installing Linux, be sure that you choose an empty drive as to not overwrite any part of the Win2000 system.

I am pretty sure this is how your friend intentionally did it in the first place, but somehow it slid in some data to the MBR changing the boot options. To me the easiest way, to dual boot was to spend the cash on an efficient prog like SC7. It was a pain to fresh install everything about every 6-8months or so and with SC7 I "MULTI-BOOT" W98SE, WMe, & WXP Pro all on the same PC. SC7 is specifically made to multiboot and it came with Partition Commander 6.0 for free!! Which I found to be a strong and user friendly prog enabling me to move data from partition to partition as I please. SC7 claims to support up to a 100 OS's, everything from MS Window (including DOS) to Linux, BEos, etc...

Well I hope this kinda' help you out, if not maybe it was informative... Hey better than NOT getting a response at all...

[Stef]

If he holds the shift key down during boot the LILO menu should come up. It will list a few boot selections, most likely they'll be Linux, Single, WIndows.

Type in Windows and press enter.

Stef