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Re: New to Debian, boot problems



"David" == David Wright <d.wright@open.ac.uk> writes:

> Quoting Willy Lee (willy2@jps.net):
[snip]
>> including the root partition, on the 2nd drive.  Now,
>> unfortunately, LILO won't boot to the slave drive.  I have to boot
>> from the boot floppy I thankfully didn't skip making during the
>> install.
>> 
>> The only other idea I have is to make an ext2 partition on hda,
>> make it bootable, copy all the files that would be in a root
>> partition over, then make lilo boot from there.  I already have
>> ext2 partitions on hda, left over from a RedHat install.  My Debian
>> install on hdb consists of /, /usr, and /home partitions.

> Only a few files have to be accessible to lilo, and I think they're
> all in /boot (as long as you install your kernel there too).

> There's no reason why /boot can't be a symlink to anywhere
> accessible on hda (<= 1023 cylinders), even if it's not an ext2
> partition (which you happen to have). What *is* important is that
> you rerun lilo if you move any of these critical files (e.g. if they
> were in a DOS partition which you defragged).

Now that I've got some time to think about this a bit (to tell the
truth, I've been avoiding thinking about it, the whole thing scares me
a bit), let me see if I'm understanding everything:

1). I move the contents of /boot to a partition on /dev/hda, e.g.,
/dev/hda5;

2). tell lilo to install itself to the mbr on hda (in lilo.conf:
'boot=/dev/hda');

3). tell lilo to boot from /dev/hda5 ('root=/dev/hda5'); should this
partition be otherwise empty?

4). tell the kernel to look for /etc and everything else on /dev/hdb1
('append="root=/dev/hdb1 ro"').

5). Once in, update /etc/fstab to mount /dev/hda5 as /boot at
startup.  Or, use symlinks.

This should work, right?  I am chicken :-), I want confirmation before I
actually try this.

thanks for the help,

=wl
-- 
Albert ``Willy'' Lee, Emacs user, game programmer
"They call me CRAZY - just because I DARE to DREAM of a RACE of 
SUPERHUMAN MONSTERS!"



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