Re: New to Debian, boot problems
Quoting Willy Lee (willy2@jps.net):
> 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:
Just make sure you have a working boot floppy, or rescue disk.
> 1). I move the contents of /boot to a partition on /dev/hda, e.g.,
> /dev/hda5;
Yes. This partition might contain kernels for other linux distributions
that you have installed, so long as you only administer it from one
distribution (i.e. only run lilo in one distribution).
You need to do step (5) at the same time.
> 2). tell lilo to install itself to the mbr on hda (in lilo.conf:
> 'boot=/dev/hda');
Yes.
> 3). tell lilo to boot from /dev/hda5 ('root=/dev/hda5'); should this
> partition be otherwise empty?
No. You don't need to tell lilo about this partition, but it
must be mounted as /boot when you run /sbin/lilo (the installer)
so that the installer can read/write the files therein.
When the machine boots, all the references to files in /dev/hda5
will be absolute disk addresses, which is why the BIOS must be able
to see it. At boot time, there's no such thing as a filesystem
or /boot because linux isn't running yet.
> 4). tell the kernel to look for /etc and everything else on /dev/hdb1
> ('append="root=/dev/hdb1 ro"').
Yes, but you don't need to put
append="root=/dev/hdb1 ro"
but just
root=/dev/hdb1
read-only
> 5). Once in, update /etc/fstab to mount /dev/hda5 as /boot at
> startup. Or, use symlinks.
Yes, but this step is part of step (1), i.e. you do this now, while
writing /etc/lilo.conf .
When you run lilo, it will read /etc/lilo.conf to see what to do.
If you look at the rest of this file, you'll see references to /boot,
e.g. map=/boot/map and these need to be available when you run lilo.
lilo will see where /boot/map is on the disk and plant references to
it in the MBR it writes.
When I said symlinks, I meant that you could leave /boot in hdb1 and,
if hda5 was a DOS partition mounted as /dosc, you could do, for example,
mkdir /dosc/debian
cd /boot
cp -i map /dosc/debian
mv -i map map.keep-a-copy-here
ln -s /dosc/debian/map map
repeating this for all the files required, and then run lilo.
Don't move the files (or defrag /dosc) after doing this, of course.
Cheers,
--
Email: d.wright@open.ac.uk Tel: +44 1908 653 739 Fax: +44 1908 655 151
Snail: David Wright, Earth Science Dept., Milton Keynes, England, MK7 6AA
Disclaimer: These addresses are only for reaching me, and do not signify
official stationery. Views expressed here are either my own or plagiarised.
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