[lug] Dual boot from two hard drives, LILO

[Dhruva B. Reddy]

Yes, I forgot to mention that this is done with the "boot" parameter in
lilo.conf.

Right now, you have it set to "/dev/hdb5".  "hdb5" is a partition, and
you want to set it to a device (such as hda or hdb).  To install lilo on
the first drive, set "boot" to "/dev/hda".  If you do this, don't forget
to run lilo again!

Is this what you want to do?  If I were in your shoes, my preference
would be to tell the BIOS to boot from the second drive.  Since this is
not an option, I see a couple of alternatives:

	-Switch your hard drives around so that your Linux drive is the
	master and your XP drive the slave.  This would cause Linux to
	recognize the Linux drive as "/dev/hda" and the XP drive as
	"/dev/hdb".  You would have to change your partition table
	(/etc/fstab) and lilo.conf to reflect this.  Having never used
	XP, I have no idea how it would deal with this.

	-As I suggested before, leave the drives where they are and
	install lilo on the XP drive.  IMHO, this is the least painful
	option available to you.

Dhruva

On Thu, May 30, 2002 at 04:52:24PM -0600, quoth Glenn Murray:
> In the BIOS settings you can select the boot order, but there is only
> one hard disk option (which the BIOS calls C:), of course Linux is on
> the other drive.  Is there some way to tell LILO to write to /dev/hda?
> And, is that what I want?
> 
> Thanks,
> Glenn Murray
> http://www.mines.edu/~gmurray
> 
> On Thu, 30 May 2002, Dhruva B. Reddy wrote:
> 
> > Does your BIOS know to boot /dev/hdb, rather than /dev/hda?  If you go
> > directly into Windoze, I'll bet this is the problem.  If this is the
> > case, you could place the MBR on /dev/hda, which would wipe out whatever
> > XP has installed and replace it with lilo.
> >
> > On Thu, May 30, 2002 at 04:25:51PM -0600, quoth Glenn Murray:
> > > Here's the lilo.conf I've been trying to use...
> > >
> > > lba32
> > > boot=/dev/hdb5
> > > root=/dev/hdb5
> > > compact
> > > install=/boot/boot.b
> > > delay=90
> > > map=/boot/map
> > > vga=normal
> > > ################################################# Linux
> > > image=/vmlinuz
> > > 	label=Linux
> > > 	read-only
> > > 	alias=l
> > >
> > > ################################################# Windoze
> > > other=/dev/hda1
> > > 	table=/dev/hda
> > > 	label=Windows
> > > 	alias=w
> > >
> > > Thanks,
> > > Glenn Murray
> > > http://www.mines.edu/~gmurray
> > >
> > > On Thu, 30 May 2002, D. Stimits wrote:
> > >
> > > > Glenn Murray wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > I've just been able to afford two hard drives on one computer, and now
> > > > > am trying to figure out how to get LILO to handle booting the two
> > > > > OSes.  On the other installations I've done they've been on different
> > > > > partitions of the same drive.
> > > > >
> > > > > hda1       XP
> > > > > hdb1       /home
> > > > > hdb2       /swap
> > > > > hdb5       /
> > > > >
> > > > > I boot fine from a floppy, but running lilo on my old lilo.conf is not
> > > > > putting the right info in the right place---the lilo "gui" does not
> > > > > appear.  The HOW-TOs are giving me way way more information than I can
> > > > > use, but from the man pages I'm guessing that I'm on hdb when I run
> > > > > LILO and I need to invoke it with a -b <boot-loader> or -A
> > > > > <master-device> option---I don't understand either.
> > > > >