LILO

Stephen Ryan sryan at gargantubrain.dartmouth.edu
Tue Oct 29 17:14:09 EST 2002


On Tue, 2002-10-29 at 16:55, Price, Erik wrote:
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Stephen Ryan [mailto:sryan at gargantubrain.dartmouth.edu]
> > On Fri, 2002-10-25 at 10:25, Price, Erik wrote:

> > > 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.  
> 
> Well, the only problem is that it appears that LILO *is* installed by
default by my Debian installation, only it's not "active" or whatever
the term is, since the SuSE LILO screen still comes up.  Because this
involves writing to MBR and /dev/sda, I'm really hesitant to do anything
that could jeopardize the Windows disk (sda has windows, sdb has Debian)
-- paranoid, actually.  Having never configured a LILO.conf file before,
I was wondering if someone could post a copy of theirs (ideally one
similar to my own setup, with Windows on one disk and Linux on another).

Well, yes.  You do have to write to /dev/sda/, since that's where the
boot block is, and it's also where the SuSE LILO is installed.

Modify the "boot=" line to read 
"boot=/dev/sda" (Note: no partition number, just the raw device) and
re-run lilo.  That will take care of the old SuSE LILO.

As for Windows on one disk and Linux on another, the only difference
between that and a single-disk dual boot is the partition name that you
specify for each, so I'll look that up tomorrow and get you a copy of my
dual-boot configuration, though (IIRC) Debian's default install should
handle that for you, and you just need to have it boot from /dev/sda.

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



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