[lug] Dual boot from two hard drives, LILO

D. Stimits stimits at idcomm.com
Sun Jun 2 14:09:49 MDT 2002


Hugh Brown wrote:
> 
> In the past, it has been my experience that windows on /dev/hda and
> linux on /dev/hdb will not work with lilo.  We always had to use a boot
> floppy.  Lilo wanted to have a /boot partition on /dev/hda.

I think that whatever is visible in the bios at bootup is useable,
non-bios drives are a problem. Used to be older motherboards couldn't
see beyond the 2nd drive (or something like that) in the bios during
bootup. But it should be possible to do this with /boot on another drive
by means of chain loading (you can put loaders on the MBR or PBR of
other drives than the first drive). I have not played with this in a
long time, especially not on IDE, so I don't know for certain the
current state. Current lilo should be able to point at any other lilo
that is visible at bootup in the bios, so long as each of the lilo
installs are valid, e.g., it won't do any good for a boot option on the
MBR of hda to point at the MBR on hdb if the hdb MBR is not valid.

D. Stimits, stimits at idcomm.com

> 
> I don't know what grub is capable of in that regard.  IIRC, grub claims
> not to be stuck with the limitations that lilo has, whatever that means.
> 
> Hugh
...



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