RE: lilo, /boot, symlinks
On 29 March Bud Rogers wrote
>
> Ack. I've just spent a frustrating couple of hours trying to
> get a new
> potato install to boot from the hard drive. It has a small /boot
> partition at hda1, / at hda2. The install process set up
> lilo.conf to
> boot /vmlinuz, which is a symlink to the real kernel in /boot. I
> thought maybe the cross partition link was a problem, so I changed it
> to boot /boot/vmlinuz and made that a symlink to the real kernel.
> Still no joy. I guess I could make lilo point directly to the kernel
> image, but it should be able to follow the symlink, shouldn't it?
>
> About the only thing left is when I partitioned the drive I did not
> make hda1 bootable. It's my understanding that lilo doesn't
> care about
> the bootable flag, but now i'm starting to wonder.
>
> I seem to remember going through about this same hassle when I put
> potato on this box. Installing from cdrom, at the point
> where you make
> the system bootable directly from hard disk and then reboot,
> I have yet
> to get a potato system to boot without a lot of manual
> intervention. I
> have the feeling that I've missed something simple and obvious here.
> Can someone give me a hint?
My guess is that you have a DOS master boot record (MBR) with LILO on
the boot sector of hda1. If so, when you boot the MBR will get loaded
first and then look for a bootable partition from which to boot. You
can: (a) make hda1 bootable so the DOS MBR will load it; (b) install
LILO on the MBR, by specifying boot=/dev/hda in lilo.conf; or (c)
install the GPL'ed master boot record confusingly called MBR.
(a) is probably the quickest way to get your system to boot. If you're
only running Linux, (b) is what I would use. (c) can have advantages if
you sometimes want to boot from unusual partitions because it is much
more flexible than the DOS MBR.
Malcolm Gray
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