Re: Urgent :Dual boot Debian+Mandrake with lilo
Hendrik Boom wrote:
On Fri, Jul 23, 2004 at 09:33:41AM -0500, Kent West wrote:
Vijaya S wrote:
It didnt work Kent.
But it has to be mounted before i see it right
No; you don't need to mount your Mandrake partitions in order to change
the /etc/lilo.conf file on your Debian side. Since Debian is the last OS
installed, I'm assuming that your current lilo is from Debian, not
Mandrake, so it's the Debian lilo that needs to be modified.
(1) I have a few questions about this, too. In lilo.conf, you need to
specify the kernel that is to be run. Is it not necessary to have
the partition containing the kernel to be mounted when you run lilo?
And don't you name it with the file name it has in the OS you're
running lilo in instead of the OS you will be booting that kernel into?
It is, because lilo needs to read all the files it could use at boot
time so as to construct a list of sectors to read.
A workaround.
Say you have this setup:
hda1 Debian
hda2 Swap, used by both. (I never use swap partitions, but that's a
debate for another time)
hda3 Mandrake.
On _one_ of these systems, whichever you install first, install lilo on
hda. We'll say you did it on Mandrake.
Configure _that_ lilo to have this (I don't have a working example to hand):
other = /dev/hda1
label = IanDeb
On the other system, configure lilo to install in hda1.
You can configure both to boot the other if you wish.
fwiw I don't like lilo very much. Grub is better.
eg
I had to "rescue" a system last week. It had RHL 7.0 on /dev/hdb and
used lilo.
While RHL 7.0 was running, I repartitioned & formatted hda and installed
Debian on it by untarring my tarball. If I didn't stuff it up I'd not
have this story to tell:-)
Recovery plan A. Create rescue CD - I had an ISO of Red Hat's Fedora
Core 2 rescue disk on my Powerbook so I burned a CD.
Variations of Plan A:
Boot CD & mount RHL 7.0, run LILO on RHL 7.0. No good, lilo thinks the
disk is too big. Probably really doesn't like 2.6 kernels (RHL 7.0 has 2.2).
Boot CD & mount Debian. Run Grub. No good, grub can't find root disk in
chroot environment.
Others we won't touch on.
Plan B.
Go to another (Debian) box, create grub floppy.
With the floppy and no menu, I could type a few commands and boot
either. Which I did. I ran lilo on RHL and installed grub on Debian and
all is well, I can boot either.
(2) This one's for curiosity only, because I will be replacing my Mandrake
soon (which I currently boot from floppy only). When I installed
Mandrake, it used the device name /dev/hde for my hard disk. I thought,
interesting. My hard disk must be on the *third* IDE chain. I wonder why.
But then sometime later, I installed Debian on another partition, and *it*
considered the same drive to be /dev/hda. This made it obscure just how to
write a lilo that whould use both device names properly. Now I know there's
probably a way to do this anyway. But my question is -- why would different
Linuxes (linuces? Linuses) want to use different devide names for the same
hard disk?
Has this weird naming happened to anyone else?
The only time I've seen that is when I had a hotrod card plugged in and
really had all those devices. My experience was with RHL and Debian.
--
Cheers
John
-- spambait
1aaaaaaa@computerdatasafe.com.au Z1aaaaaaa@computerdatasafe.com.au
Tourist pics http://portgeographe.environmentaldisasters.cds.merseine.nu/
Reply to: