[lug] Giveaway + Lilo/LI question

[Wayde Allen]

On Wed, 14 Jun 2000, RADKE  JOSHUA PAUL wrote:

> My first question is:  Has anybody gotten LILO to boot from /dev/hdb by
> specifying HDD-1 (primary slave) at the first boot choice in the bios?
> I've seen a lot of discussion of getting it to co-exist with windoze on
> the MBR, and suggestions that lilo can happily boot off of any disk the
> bios claims to be able to boot from, but I haven't seen specific examples
> of success with this configuration.

I routinely boot Linux from the second drive on my system (/dev/sdb) and
occasionally Windows NT from the 1st drive (/dev/sda), and have set up
similar configurations on IDE drives too.  I've never really had any
problems.

> Ok, the specific information.  RedHat 6.2.  /dev/hda is windoze 98 SE, and
> /dev/hdb is linux.  /dev/hdb is set (manually) in the bios to be run in
> LBA mode - and the RedHat installation (and fdisk) was run with the bios
> in that mode.  /dev/hdb1 is bootable (fdisk), and resides on cylinders 1-7
> (or 1-8?), and is 32 MB (or so).

Your description seems a bit overly complicated to me.  That could very
well mean that I don't quite understand your situation. 

Anyway, the master boot record is what you create by setting the bootable
flag in fdisk.  Since this really is just a piece of code that tells the
system where to find the boot manager (LILO), you only need to set one
disk partition bootable.  I routinely let this be the first disk in my
system so if you list the partitions on my first disk you'd see: 

   Device Boot   Start      End   Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *        1      261  2096451    6  DOS 16-bit >=32M

My second drive is partitioned as:

   Device Boot   Start      End   Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1            1       16   128488+  82  Linux swap
/dev/sdb2           17      143  1020127+  83  Linux native
/dev/sdb3          144      262   955867+  83  Linux native

Now I set my /etc/lilo.conf file to read:

   boot=/dev/sda
   root=/dev/sdb2
   compact
   install=/boot/boot.b
   map=/boot/map
   vga=normal
   delay=20
   image=/vmlinuz
      label=Linux
      read-only
   other = /dev/sda1
      label = WinNT
      table = /dev/sda

This tells LILO that the boot record is on /dev/sda and that the root
device for my linux system is at /dev/sdb2.  The root device is where the
/boot directory is located.  This contains the kernel maps pointing LILO
to the system you choose to load (Windows, Linux, etc.).

Have you read the Lilo manual that usually resides on your Linux box
at /usr/doc/lilo/Manual.txt?  This has a very good description of the boot
process, and how to configure LILO. 

Hope this helps.

- Wayde
  (wallen at boulder.nist.gov)