On 29 March Bud Rogers wrote > > Ack. I've just spent a frustrating couple of hours trying to > get a new > potato install to boot from the hard drive. It has a small /boot > partition at hda1, / at hda2. The install process set up > lilo.conf to > boot /vmlinuz, which is a symlink to the real kernel in /boot. I > thought maybe the cross partition link was a problem, so I changed it > to boot /boot/vmlinuz and made that a symlink to the real kernel. > Still no joy. I guess I could make lilo point directly to the kernel > image, but it should be able to follow the symlink, shouldn't it? > > About the only thing left is when I partitioned the drive I did not > make hda1 bootable. It's my understanding that lilo doesn't > care about > the bootable flag, but now i'm starting to wonder. > > I seem to remember going through about this same hassle when I put > potato on this box. Installing from cdrom, at the point > where you make > the system bootable directly from hard disk and then reboot, > I have yet > to get a potato system to boot without a lot of manual > intervention. I > have the feeling that I've missed something simple and obvious here. > Can someone give me a hint?
My guess is that you have a DOS master boot record (MBR) with LILO on the boot sector of hda1. If so, when you boot the MBR will get loaded first and then look for a bootable partition from which to boot. You can: (a) make hda1 bootable so the DOS MBR will load it; (b) install LILO on the MBR, by specifying boot=/dev/hda in lilo.conf; or (c) install the GPL'ed master boot record confusingly called MBR. (a) is probably the quickest way to get your system to boot. If you're only running Linux, (b) is what I would use. (c) can have advantages if you sometimes want to boot from unusual partitions because it is much more flexible than the DOS MBR. Malcolm Gray
