Bug#231380: debian-installer: lilo installer fails when default devfs name(disc) is changed
Package: debian-installer
Severity: normal
Followup-For: Bug #231380
-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
APT prefers unstable
APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.4
Locale: LANG=en_CA, LC_CTYPE=en_CA
The following occurred with floppies, business-card iso and the
netinstall iso.
I am not familiar with the devfs names but a peek (Alt-F2 ; mount)
suggested I could install lilo on a partition if I changed the default,
.../disc, to .../part5, for example. Although I was prompted to make the
partition active and accepted it, another peek (no lilo.conf) indicated
that the lilo installation appeared to have failed. I then found myself
at the menu with the grub install highlighted. Trying to re-select lilo
install only returned me to the highlighted grub install. If I finished
the install, of course the new installation would not boot as "other" in
my main lilo.conf. There were no obvious messages indicating the
failure. (A quick mount..., copy of a simple lilo.conf with initrd and a
chroot /mnt lilo fixed that.) Grub installs OK on a partition if you
give it the name of the partition it understands.
More generally, the new installer seems to offer dire warnings but not
much facility for arranging a dual boot machine. If the defaults are
accepted the previously installed system (in my case Debian unstable)
was not accessible after rebooting as the admonishments suggested.
I pretended to be a novice and did not use the expert installation.
I would have expected that a dual boot setup would be quite common
and necessarily included for a novice intallation.
Hope this helps. (it is my first effort at testing and reporting
problems with report -- nice system)
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