booting off of reluctant cd

[will trillich <will@serensoft.com>]

i've got an old box that's just begging to become a firewall
but i can't get it to boot from cd -- it says it finds the cd
rom, says it's trying to boot from it, and then checks for a
diskette, then falls back to the hard drive.

the hard drive already has debian/lilo on it; surely there's an
incantation where i can tell it during the boot-up process to
use /dev/cdrom instead of /dev/hda, isn't there?

according to 'man lilo.conf' i may be able to enter

	linux boot=/dev/cdrom

or maybe

	linux boot=/dev/hdc

(if the cdrom is the master on the secondary bus) right? would
that leave anything fuxnored? or is the voodoo elsewhere?

-- 
I use Debian/GNU Linux version 2.2;
Linux server 2.2.17 #1 Sun Jun 25 09:24:41 EST 2000 i586 unknown
 
DEBIAN NEWBIE TIP #121 from Eric G. Miller <egm2@jps.net>
and Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com>
:
So you figured out your partition scheme needs updating -- and
you want TO MOVE THE /VAR PARTITION to /dev/sda#: Definitely go
into single user mode first (telint 1).  You don't want
processes writing to log files, spool files, etc... while you do
the migration.
  1.  Go Single User
  2.  mount -t <ext2> /newvar /dev/sdaX
  3.  mount -o remount,ro /var
  4.  Copy files via your favorite method ("cp -a /var /newvar" should work).
  5.  umount /newvar
  6.  umount /var
  7.  Edit fstab to point /var at /dev/sdaX
  8.  mount /var (now on the new disk)
  9.  exit (go back to multi-user mode)
When moving partitions it's important to use a method that
preserves permissions.  Otherwise all hell can break loose...
Once you're comfortable with the transfer, reclaim the original
partition for some other use.

Also see http://newbieDoc.sourceForge.net/ ...