Making a disk bootable.
I just got a brand new pretty-damned-big (5.1GB) IDE HD to play
with and I've decided to switch over to Debian on it (currently using
RedHat). The problem I'm having isn't directly Debian-related but
rather lilo-related ... basically I can't get my new IDE HD to
boot. Let me begin, however, by describing how I'm approaching getting
Debian going, in case somebody can tell me that this is just wrong
and/or undoable.
My attempts to get this drive going, so far, have excluded the
use of any floppy media, mainly because I don't have a floppy drive
convenient in this machine. I'm guessing that all I really need to do
is partition the new drive, mkfs it, untar base2_0.tgz onto it, fiddle
with files in /etc, make the whole thing bootable, download/install
Debian packages and voila, I should have done what the installer was
going to do for me. I've gotten to the point where I can boot into my
Debian partition on my new drive on /dev/hdb, using the lilo booter
on my main drive, /dev/hda, confirming at least part of my theory here.
The problem I'm having is when I move my new drive from /dev/hdb
to /dev/hda to boot off of it. I've setup lilo.conf (which feels
tricky because I need to tell lilo to play with /dev/hdb, even though
the image roots are on /dev/hda) and run lilo while chrooted to my new
root partition on /dev/hdb, but when I boot I get 'LI' followed by an
endless amount of ' 07's. I'm guessing that this refers to the 0x07
LILO error code, but I'm not sure how to fix this. In my attempts to
get this going I have: made my new root partition relatively small
(256MB), set the 'linear' option in my lilo.conf, set the disk
geometry for /dev/hdb in the lilo.conf (whenever I run lilo, so far,
the new disk is always on /dev/hdb) and toggled the LBA mode in my
BIOS. Nothing seems to affect anything, although I did get '01's
instead a couple of times (I forget under which circumstance(s)).
Has anybody got any suggestions on how to proceed to either
figure out what's up here or how to fix it? Would it make a difference
if I just used the floppy installer instead of fiddling with the new
drive while it's on /dev/hdb? Help and suggestions muchly appreciated
...
-- Mishka
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