LILO

[Stephen Ryan]

On Fri, 2002-10-25 at 10:25, Price, Erik wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On my work computer (which currently has one drive for Win2k and another drive for Debian3.0), I had at one time installed SuSE Linux.  I later wrote Debian3.0 over the SuSE Linux install, but forgot that I had installed LILO from SuSE.  I boot into Debian by using a boot disk.
> 
> When the computer boots up, if I don't have the Debian boot disk in the floppy drive, the SuSE LILO choice comes up, and if I forget to choose Windows, it tries to boot the SuSE distro.  I guess the Debian install never overwrote the vmlinuz file pointed to by the SuSE LILO.  (It is definitely booting the SuSE distro b/c the Debian boot output is very different from the SuSE boot output and when the prompt comes up, it's the old name for the computer when I had SuSE on it, not the new one that I gave the machine when I installed Debian).
> 
> So my question is this -- if I use apt-get to install LILO from Debian, will it overwrite the LILO that's already there from SuSE?  Safely?  I'd like to kill a few birds with one stone --
> 
> 1) No longer use a boot disk to boot into Debian
> 2) Set the system to boot Windows by default
> 3) Get rid of the SuSE LILO screen and the inadvertent boot into the SuSE distro
> 
> I would assume that I could do this by installing LILO from Debian.  Ideally it will overwrite the LILO that was installed by SuSE, and then I can run the LILO commands to change the defaults.  But I thought I'd run it by the list first, so I don't screw anything up.
> 

Sounds good to me.  You'll just have to put a "default" line in the
block for Windows, and boot=/dev/hda at the top to make sure that this
lilo overwrites anything previously installed.  

--  
Stephen Ryan                                        Debian Linux 3.0
Technology Coordinator
Center for Educational Outcomes
at Dartmouth College