[lug] LILO Solved

[Wayde Allen]

On Thu, 15 Jun 2000, RADKE  JOSHUA PAUL wrote:

> 
> After getting home yesterday, I had a chance to look through the docs
> again, and I'm not sure if it helped, but I did get it working.  Thanks to
> Wayde Allen for some great tips.
> 
> It appears that (at least for my purposes) LILO can not be installed on
> /dev/hdb, even when the BIOS is told to boot that drive.  This remains a
> lingering question, but is this a limitation of LILO or the BIOS's way of
> booting?
> 
> In the end, my lilo.conf file was changed such that:
> boot = /dev/hdb
> 	became
> boot = /dev/hda
> 
> That was it.  If anybody has any insight about using the bios to boot
> other drives, I'd love to hear them.
> 
> Actually, I don't know if it really worked, since I haven't booted windows
> since I got an easily accessible Linux *grin*.

Like I said before, some of what you are saying about the boot process
doesn't seem to make sense.  Either I'm not understanding what you are
doing (very likely), or you don't quite understand the boot process.  At
any rate, you really should take the time to read the lilo manual.  See
/usr/doc/Manual.txt on your Linux machine.  I think many of the answers
you are looking for are explained there in much more detail than we can
reasonably provide via e-mail.  For example, the following is a quote from
this document: 

   The LILO boot sector is designed to be usable as a partition boot
   sector. (I.e. there is room for the partition table.) Therefore, the
   LILO boot sector can be stored at the following locations:

     - boot sector of a Linux floppy disk. (/dev/fd0, ...) 
     - MBR of the first hard disk. (/dev/hda, /dev/sda, ...) 
     - boot sector of a primary Linux file system partition on the first
       hard disk. (/dev/hda1, ...) 
     - partition boot sector of an extended partition on the first hard
       disk. (/dev/hda1, ...)* 

     * Most FDISK-type programs don't believe in booting from an extended 
       partition and refuse to activate it. LILO is accompanied by a
       simple program (activate) that doesn't have this restriction. Linux
       fdisk also supports activating extended partitions.

   It _can't_ be stored at any of the following locations:

     - boot sector of a non-Linux floppy disk or primary partition. 
     - a Linux swap partition. 
     - boot sector of a logical partition in an extended partition.* 
     - on the second hard disk. (Unless for backup installations, if the 
       current first disk will be removed or disabled, or if some other
       boot loader is used, that is capable of loading boot sectors from other 
       drives.) 

     *  LILO can be forced to put the boot sector on such a partition by
        using the  -b  option or the BOOT variable. However, only few programs that 
        operate as master boot records support booting from a logical 
        partition.

   Although LILO tries to detect attempts to put its boot sector at an
   invalid location, you should not rely on that. 

If nothing else, you should read the introduction section in this document
so you can get a better idea about how the disks are structured, and how
the boot-strapping process of starting the machine works.

- Wayde
  (wallen at boulder.nist.gov)