Re: LI on boot

[Alvin Oga <aoga@ns.Linux-Consulting.com>]

On Wed, 9 Mar 2005, Tom Pfeifer wrote:

> Ernst-Magne Vindal wrote:
> > 
> > On Wed, 9 Mar 2005, Marc Perrudin wrote:

> > > >Ok....  I guess I'll just have to reinstall...  It's good practice
> > > >anyway.. :o)...

extreme bad practice to reinstall ... there is no guarantee the reinstall
will work if you did exactly the same reinstall steps
	- reinstalling is windoze style

- best practice ... figure out what is broken and why nd report the bugg
  if one likes reporting bugs
	- post a summary of the solution to fix the problem on the
	original mailing list 

> > > If you reinstall, install sarge directly and use grub instead of lilo so
> > > you don't need a /boot partition.

files in /boot is needed by both grub and lilo

> > Hi, is it correct to say "install Grub so you don't need /boot part"?

that's bogus

> The /boot partition was only needed when you either had a BIOS that
> could not access the entire drive, 

yes but...

access enough of the boot kernel to boot up and do more magic,
but necessarily need access to the entire drive

> or if you had an older version of Lilo that couldn't.

or if windoze is loaded and is more than 512MB in first partition 
( /dev/hda1 )

or other reasons .. where one /boot is needed like boot deb and rh and
suse all on the same disks with sahred /home but different "os"

 In that case you would put the /boot partition near
> the beginning of the drive - the part that could be accessed - in order
> to get the Linux kernel loaded. Once the kernel took over, it could then
> access the entire disk. 

and /boot should be entirely under 512MB and typically 50MB or less
	1MB-2MB per kernel you want to use, so having 50MB is for
	supporting 25-50 kernels
 
> The versions of Lilo in both Woody and Sarge do not require a /boot
> partition for this purpose. Grub never did as far as I know.

what is in /boot/grub ??

sure it does

--------------

for the original problem ....
	/	your rootfs
	/home	your data
	/swap	if you like swap at the end

	but what is your /etc/lilo.conf looking like ??
	there some options that is not properly set that you get "LI"
	during boot

	- but i consider anything less than 7 partitions a bad partition
	scheme

	- i prefer:
		/	256MB
		/tmp	256MB
		/var	1 GB
		/usr	4 GB
		swap	512MB
		/home	rest of disk

		and backup only /etc  and /home and /usr/local/src

c ya
alvin