Re: LILO on hdc (to be hda)

[William T Wilson <fluffy@snurgle.org>]

On Fri, 6 Aug 1999, Keith001 wrote:

> Can those scripts get some input from the keyboard at that time?

Probably.  You can just use sulogin to get a quick root-shell to make any
needed tweaks.  The advantage to this is that you can use vi or something
to make changes, instead of having to rely on predeterined configurations.
You could also throw together a quick menu program in C or something and
just run that.

You could also use dmesg to see what drives the system has detected at
boot.  This will require you to parse dmesg with sed (best to not use perl
at this early stage, in case it's not mounted yet) but, it will allow the
boot to happen without user intervention.

> - I'm not too fond of one of my two drives heating the box, wasting
> power and making noise when I know I won't be using it for the next
> ten hours (or ten days) - and my first disk is used for windows stuff,
> so one day may come when I will only be using it occasionally (of
> course, I can then put it as hdb & boot it from lilo with remapping,
> or directly from the bios)

The best way to do this is to unmount all the filesystems on the unwanted
drive (which they would be anyway) and spin it down with hdparm -Y or
hdparm -y.  It is, on the whole, much better than pulling on the plugs:

You can leave your case on (improves cooling) :}
You don't risk damaging the connectors
It's easier

> - I may sometimes need to plug my drive on another computer

Reasonable; but then your fstab won't work anyway. :}

> - anyway the main reason is that I came to Linux because I wanted to
> be able to fine tune & customize my system, so I wanted to KNOW how to
> do this even if I have other maybe more practical or realistic ways to
> solve my problem...

:}

That's the best reason right there :}