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Technology Stocks : LINUX -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Greg Jung who wrote (1888)	12/3/1999 5:32:00 PM
From: E. Charters	Respond to of 2615

The bootable partition must be within the first 1023 cylinders. However you can boot from a floppy and then go to a root partition anywhere on the target disk. If you have two tiny boot partitions that are selected from a floppy by mount OR selected from LILO on the HD or SD then you can boot from either. The partition table remains the same. If you use LILO in the MBR of one drive and then select the parition you want to boot from there you can go anywhere. I used to use IBM's boot manager to boot LILO off a SCSI drive, then I could use LILO to boot the IDE drive in turn if I changed my mind. All the BIOS sees is the boot manager partition as active so it directs the computer to boot it. After that I can select a SCSI drive with paritions to 4000 cylinder if I want AND come back to booting DOS at that point. With VMWARE you,can simultaneously run Windows AND Linux on the same machine but it is a pricey product, I think 100 US dollars. Some cards need one of the card's boot ROM disabled if two cards are used in the same machine. the Adaptec 1522 and similar cards are like this. You could try it with the future domain card, but I don't know if this is a solution. There is usually a jumper to set or sometimes it could be in a setup routine after control-A is hit on boot. If you run Lilo -C "path/lilo.conf" then you can set Lilo on the floppy to boot the hard disk of choice. I don't think you can tell lilo to rename parititions if that is what you mean, as the partition table is fixed named on the hard disk as far as I know. If you mean select a different part of the disk then the parition name is still what it is always called but it may be the root partition in one configuration and just another partition in another. Of course the files in /root are root's no matter what. One one floppy Lilo may have a statement disk=/dev/sda on another floppy if may say in the global part, disk=/dev/sdb and the BOOT will go to that disk. What you can do is select a boot and map file from one directory and a boot and mapfile in another directory for a different boot. I don't know how you select a particular partition as boot from Lilo unless it is mounted under a different name per se. The disk could have a partition mounted under different names allowing selectability. Actually you have to do this as you cannot have / and / as two different partitions on the same level of the drive. At least not in my current fantasy. boot=/dev/hda map=/boot/map install=/boot/boot.b prompt timeout=50 image=/vmlinuz label=newkernel root=/dev/hda1 read-only image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.2.5-15 label=linux root=/dev/hda1 read-only ----------------------------------------- This is from the Lilo Mini How to file: In this the drive's partition is renamed to run a different kernel under different root name. ----------------------------------------- Installing hdc to Boot as hda and Using bios= Lilo allows to map the kernel image from one disk and instruct the BIOS to retrieve it from another disk. For example, it's common for me to install Linux on a disk I connect to hdc (master disk of secondary controller) and boot it as a standalong system on the primary IDE controller of another computer. I copied the installation floppy to a tiny partition, so I can run chroot in a virtual console to install hdc while I use the system to do something else. The lilo.conf file I use to install Lilo looks like: # This file must be used from a system running off /dev/hdc boot = /dev/hdc # overwrite MBR of hdc disk = /dev/hdc # tell how hdc will look like: bios = 0x80 # the bios will see it as first drive delay = 0 vga = 0 image = /boot/vmlinux # this is on /dev/hdc1 root = /dev/hda1 # but at boot it will be hda1 label = Linux read-only This configuration file must be read by a Lilo running off /dev/hdc1. The Lilo maps that get written the boot sector (/dev/hdc) must refer to the files in /boot (currently installed as hdc); such files will be accessed under hda when this disk will be booted as a standalone system. I call this configuration file /mnt/etc/lilo.conf.hdc (/mnt is where hdc is mounted during the installation. I install Lilo by invoking "cd /mnt; chroot . sbin/lilo -C /etc/lilo.conf.hdc".Refer to the manual page for chroot if this looks magic. The ``bios=' directive in lilo.conf is used to tell Lilo what the BIOS thinks of your devices. BIOS calls identify floppy disks and hard drives with a number: 0x00 and 0x01 select the floppy drives, 0x80 and the following numbers select hard disks (old BIOSes can only access two disks). The meaning of ``bios =0x80 in the previous sample file is therefore ``use 0x80 in your BIOS calls for /dev/hdc'. This Lilo directive can be handy in other situations, for example when your BIOS is able to boot from SCSI disks instead of IDE ones. When both IDE and SCSI devices are there, Lilo can't tell whether 0x80 will refer to one or the other because the user is able to choose it in the BIOS configuration menus, and the BIOS can't be accessed while Linux is running. By default, Lilo assumes that IDE drives are mapped first by the BIOS, but this can be overridden by using instructions like these in /etc/lilo.conf: disk = /dev/sda bios = 0x80 ************************************************************