Lilo, help please!

Mark Street jet at sonic.net
Wed Jul 17 10:31:02 PDT 2002


I hate when that happens.  OK, if you have not already pulled your hair 
out.....  Read through this a few times and do some planning before jumping 
off the cliff.... is your parachute packed properly?

1.  You feel like Dorothy in the wizard of Oz.... there's no place like 
home...  You want to go back home.
2.  Power down, insert the EZ Drive disk in floppy.
3.  From the EZ Drive menu pick Advanced Options
4.  From the list pick Backup/Restore Track 0
5.  EZ Drive will restore its entry in the MBR of /dev/hda
6.  Reboot and have a beer, do more searching on the net for setting up a 
linux windoze duel boot with EZ Drive.

Now, if you want to give it another go......

Install LILO to your root partition's boot record instead of your master 
boot record and set your boot flag to your root 
partition.  What?????  Think about it for a moment after studying lilo.conf

To install LILO to the root partition's boot record during install simply 
select the root partition as where to put LILO when your Linux installer 
asks you.

On your existing sytem you may be able to edit lilo.conf and add 
boot=/dev/hdd1 and re-run lilo.  So instead of installing lilo into the MBR 
of /dev/hda you install it into the boot partition of linux on the linux 
drive /dev/hdd1.  ReRun lilo and see how it goes.  Then take a peek at the 
mkbootdisk command and create a bootdisk for the new setup.

What are we doing here....
1.  Restoring the MBR on /dev/hda with EZ Drive.
2.  Moving the boot info for linux to the boot partition of the linux drive 
instead of the MBR of the windoze drive.
3.  Making a boot disk to use to boot Linux from the new drive just in case.
4.  EZ Drive must control the MBR of both drives because of the old 
bios.  Actually I don't think linux cares much as it does not use the BIOS 
to access a drive, its windoze that has the screaming hissy fit.

As a side note the lilo -u will UNinstall lilo from the MBR but may not 
restore the old entry for doze.  If it was a windoze system you should 
probably use fdisk /MBR to restore the MBR.

Use this info at your own risk, think about it, talk about it with others 
until you feel comfortable with what you are about to do.

Mark


 > At 04:16 PM 7/14/2002 -0700, cal herrmann wrote:
> > >I have tried to install Mandrake 8.1 in my wife's computer, older, win98.
> > >Lilo seems to flash past in an instant if I look close, booting Linux
> > > without a choice for windows. (Maybe it has made a wise choice, but my
> > > wife needs some things in windows! And do I also).
> > >Machine has two drives, all win on the first, second set to all linux.
> > > Since it is older, it uses the "EZDrive program" to extend HD addressing
> > > (reassigns to 255 heads).  I see:
> > >less /etc/lilo.conf
> > >boot=/dev/hda
> > >map=/boot/map
> > >install=/boot/boot.b
> > >default=linux
> > >keytable=/boot/us.klt
> > >lba 32
> > >prompt
> > >timeout=50
> > >message=/boot/message
> > >menu-scheme=wbibw:wb:bw
> > >image=/boot/vmlinux
> > >         label=linux
> > >         root=/dev/hdd1
> > >         append=" hdc=ide-scsi devfs=mount"
> > >         readonly
> > >image=/boot/vmlinux
> > >         label=failsafe
> > >         root=/dev/hdd1
> > >append="hdc=ide-scsi devfs=mount failsafe"
> > >         readonly
> > >I see a very good explanation of Lilo in the Linux Bible book, far beyond
> > > my understanding yet, I need advice, what to do next.  Fearful!  Can I
> > > get the direction back to include the windows boot? Should I uninstall
> > > and start over? (Xwindows doesn't work, I haven't found the right driver,
> > > but linux seems to work fine as command-line).
> > >Thanks, Cal



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