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installation and lilo

DISCUSSION neil t 3 participants 3 messages Nov 22, 2002

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neil t

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#0 lore raw

(this didn't send the first time, so I am posting it again via a FWD)

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Arachne/DRdos-Mandrake9.0/Basiclinux-QrpHamRadio
http://www.qsl.net/wa4chq
 


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Greetings-
I have a weird setup, but right now I am ok with it. I originally had Redhat 7.2 on hda3, dos on hda1 and a spare drive slaved off the cdrom called hdd 1.
Everything was lovely. Then I installed the latest Debian on hdd1 and had it boot from a disk instead of messing with lilo. Other then being slower that way, it was ok. Then I got a copy of Mandrake 9.0 and decided to put it on hdd1 in place of the Debian. But somehow I missed the part about the option to make it boot from a disk or lilo. What happened was now Mandrake is top dog. I tried editting lilo.config, but forgot to type 'lilo' after the editting and now I can't get Redhat to boot. I can access all my stuff, so that is not a problem. But now I have hda3 kinda doing nothing useful. What I want to know is if I decide to get rid of Redhat and either reinstall it or reinstall debian, what will happen to Mandrake? Will that get screwed up? Or will I be able to chose Debian, Dos or Mandrake like I want? I am sure Debian will be a safe bet because I know it asked about the boot disk, but just thought I would ask the knowledgeable group here. Cheers
Neil T.

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Arachne/DRdos-Mandrake9.0/Basiclinux-QrpHamRadio
http://www.qsl.net/wa4chq
 


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#1 lore raw
Quoted 1 line · neil t

(this didn't send the first time, so I am posting it again via a FWD)

It does not really make any differance which system installed lilo, the secret is mounting all your disks/partitions where "lilo" can reach them all in one go, you can define any partition "in use or not" as long as it is mounted.

An example;
dos = hda1
redhat = hda5
mandrake = hdc1
slackware = hdd1

You boot with mandrake, you then create some extra dirs'

mkdir /hda5
mkdir /hdc1
mkdir /hdd1

mount -t ext2 /dev/hda5 /hda5
mount -t ext2 /dev/hdd1 /hdd1

Edit /etc/lilo and reflect the above

image = image-redhat
label = redhat
root = /hda5/boot/image-redhat
read-only

same idea for slack.

run lilo with -t to check that all is ok, when all is ok /sbin/lilo reboot

Another way is to copy all bootable images into one /boot dir and edit lilo.conf accordingly.

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Regards Richard
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http://people.zeelandnet.nl/pa3gcu/

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#2 lore raw
In reply to neil t

neil --

Your message was pretty hard to read, dut to its lack of paragraphing, so I hope I'm reading it right. Shorn of detail, you need a way to make LILO successfully boot multiple candidate OSs, each with an associated kernel and root partition. You do this by editing (as root) the file /etc/lilo.conf (NOT lilo.config), then running lilo to install the changes.

You say you did the edit (I'll assume the wrong filename was just an e-mail typo) but "forgot" to run lilo. Well, the fix or that should be pretty obvious: boot the system somehow (a rescue floppy, or to Mandrake) and run lilo. I trust you realize that each root (or, more precisely, each /etc) directory will have its own copy of lilo.conf, so if you boot to Mandrake, you may need to re-edit its lilo.conf (on hdd1) so it contains the changes you (probably) made to Red Hat's lilo.conf (on hda3). Or you can mount /dev/hda3 somewhere and tell lilo to use /mount_point/etc/lilo.conf for its installation instructions.

If you install Debian, it will replace your existing bootloader with a lilo install that boots only Debian. After it does that, you can edit its /etc/lilo.conf, then run lilo, to restore the options to boot DOS or Mandrake, but the Debian installer itself won't add those choices for you.

Quoted 3 lines · neil t

(this didn't send the first time, so I am posting it again via a FWD)
[...]
Greetings- I have a weird setup, but right now I am ok with it. I originally had Redhat 7.2 on hda3, dos on hda1 and a spare drive slaved off the cdrom called hdd 1. Everything was lovely. Then I installed the latest Debian on hdd1 and had it boot from a disk instead of messing with lilo. Other then being slower that way, it was ok. Then I got a copy of Mandrake 9.0 and decided to put it on hdd1 in place of the Debian. But somehow I missed the part about the option to make it boot from a disk or lilo. What happened was now Mandrake is top dog. I tried editting lilo.config, but forgot to type 'lilo' after the editting and now I can't get Redhat to boot. I can access all my stuff, so that is not a problem. But now I have hda3 kinda doing nothing useful. What I want to know is if I decide to get rid of Redhat and either reinstall it or reinstall debian, what will happen to Mandrake? Will that get screwed up? Or will I be able to chose Debian, Dos or Mandrake like I want? I am sure Debian will be a safe bet because I know it asked about the boot disk, but just thought I would ask the knowledgeable group here. Cheers Neil T. -- Arachne/DRdos-Mandrake9.0/Basiclinux-QrpHamRadio http://www.qsl.net/wa4chq

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