LILO bug?
Whenever I try to install lilo to an IDE drive other than the one
one which I booted, and the later drive is SCSI, I get the following
warning message from LILO:
Warning: /dev/hda is not on the first disk
(e.g., if the target partition is on /dev/hda)
LILO documentation explains this warning as follows:
The specified partition is probably not on the first disk.
LILO's boot sector can only be booted from the first disk
unless some special boot manager is used.
The warning is useful and correct but there is no warning that
under these conditions, LILO gets erroneously installed on the
SCSI drive (i.e. the "first disk"), rendering that drive
unbootable. Note that there is no warning that the lilo.conf
"boot=" parameter is about to be overridden, and futhermore this
seems like an error condition, not a warning condition, even if
LILO's behavior is for some reason regarded as consistent.
This is not motherboard nor BIOS dependent behavior. I've seen
it on a wide variety of systems, and it's an old problem that
I've seen with serveral versions of LILO.
I've experimented with workarounds using disk= and bios= stanzas,
without success. I know about the rescue floppy workaround
and grub, but I'm looking for a better solution and also I am
considering filing a bug report because even if there is a
combination of optional stanzas that "fix" the problem, the fact
that LILO gets installed on the wrong disk without any warning,
seems like a bug.
Thanks for any help.
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