Re: LINUX NEED SUPPORT FROM MS?!: booting from hdb with lilo

[Peter J Ross <pjr@britishlibrary.net>]

On Saturday 26 Feb 2005 10:18, j smith wrote:

> LILO version 22.2, Copyright (C) 1992-1998 Werner
> Almesberger

Unfortunately, older versions of lilo can have trouble in the kind of 
situation you describe.

Take a look at the man page. (I'm quoting here from the latest Debian 
unstable version.)

 disk=<device-name>
    Defines non-standard parameters for  the  specified  disk.   See
    section  "Disk  geometry" of user.tex for details.  For versions
    of LILO prior to 22.5, the `bios=' parameter is quite useful for
    specifying how the BIOS has assigned device codes to your disks.
    For example,

        disk=/dev/sda
           bios=0x80
        disk=/dev/hda
           bios=0x81
        disk=/dev/sdb
           inaccessible

     would say that your SCSI disk is the  first  BIOS  disk  (0x80),
     that  your  (primary  master)  IDE  disk is the second BIOS disk
     (0x81), and that your second SCSI disk (perhaps  a  USB  device)
     receives  no  device code, and is therefore inaccessible at boot
     time.

     NOTE: Use of the 'bios=' option is  largely  obsolete  beginning
     with  LILO version 22.5, as the boot loader now identifies disks
     by 32-bit Volume-ID, and defers BIOS device  code  determination
     until boot time.

I'm not sure how exactly this applies to your situation because I 
don't know what your BIOS settings are, but the documentation and a 
Google search for "bios=0x80" ought to point towards a solution.

You could try physically swapping the disks, of course.

Btw, loadlin.exe isn't a Microsoft product. ;-)

-- 
PJR :-)