codefool's Journal: Adventures in dual-booting Win2K/Mandrake on a VAIO Z505LSK

Update: Mandrake 10.0 Installs clean on a VAIO without any modifications at all. Next project: build the kernel from scratch.

So I've decided that I've been out of the Linux game long enough. Sure, I earn my bread on Windows, but its time to break out of the box, as it were, and figure out what this Linux thing is all about. I mean, if half of the capatilst world is trying to destroy it, then there must be something to it.

I decided I wanted to put Linux on my laptop. But since I do a lot of Windoze contract work, I needed to keep my installation of Win2K. Getting this to work was quite a lot of fun, and here's the brunt of it.

First I googled to find the 2000 sources of how to do this, but as each Linux is 'special' in its own way, there was tons of information to go through. I decided upon Mandrake Linux 9.2 because I had toyed with it before, and it seems pretty simple to set up. On thing everyone agreed on was that Linux needs its bootloader to be within the first 1024 cyls of the disk, which usuallly isn't a problem, but its something to look out for.

I used BootIT NG to partition the disk because, well, I already owned it and it does the job. The VAIO had a 20G HDD, so I split it up into:

• 16MB EMBR for BootIT NG
• 6150MB FAT-32 for Windows 2000
• 6150MB Linux Native for Mandrake
• 64??MB to share between the two.

My plan is to have all my source, development, etc. on the shared partition, which means I need to mount /home to that drive when I get Linux installed. Since I forgot this step, I have cleanup to do. Later.

First I installed Windows 2000 on H(0)P(2) with no problem. Although the Win2K bootloader sees H(0)P(3) as an 'Unknown operating system on C:', which makes no real sense. I edited the boot.ini to remove the reference to the other partition, and now BootIT NG can boot straight into Win2K. That's done.

The largest challenge of all was getting Linux installed. This is because, and only because, the Z505LSK does not have an integrated CDROM, but can boot from one via a PCMCIA card (which is, btw, a dongle off the CDROM drive). It seems that when the CDROM is booted, it appears to Linux as an ATAPI device, but once it figures out that a PCMCIA card exists, it moves it to the PC Card bus, which FUBARS the install. So you have to do a little magic. Namely, press F1 to enter in boot options, and then type this little piece of magic:

linux ide2=0x180,0x386 noauto

Which, I assume, tells the installer where it can find the CDROM drive, and not to try and move it. Once this peice of arcane knowledge was finally discovered, the install went very smoothly. Funny, if I google 'ide2=0x180' I get tons of hits - the info is out there, people, you just need the right keywords.

So everything is just peachy at the moment. Except, I have to go and change the mounts to that /home is on the share partition. I thought it pretty cool that either Samba or Samba-like functionality is already in Mandrake - it seems my DOS drivers are mounted as /mnt/win-c and /mnt/win-d which makes my life very easy at this point.

So I'm off to learn the world of Linux. If I didn't make so much money off of the M$ monopoly, I would dump Windoze completeley and go with Linux full-time just because its so cool.

Thanks to all the Linux people out there for giving us such a tool to work with.