On Tue, 12 Mar 2002, Gerard Robin wrote:
> About lilo :
> I use lilo to boot on HDD1 on which win98 and potato 2.2r2 are installed.
> And on HDD2 "potato -> woody" is installed.(I experiment ....)
> I don't know if lilo can accommodate the three systems ?
Yes, in several ways.
It's possible to have lilo installed in the MBR of hdd1 and having three
boot choices:
- win98 on hdd1
- potato on hdd1
- woody on hdd2
However, I personally don't like including boot entries for a system on a
separate disk in the MBR of another disk. If I have systems on different
disks, I prefer to choose between them using the BIOS setup.
This gives you the choice of removing either disk and not affecting the
other system, if your disks are IDE. The disk will also work on another
machine (provided the rest of the system is compatible) if installed in
the same position in the IDE bus. This is because the IDE disk devices
always point to the same disk:
/dev/hda Master disk, primary bus
/dev/hdb Slave disk. primary bus
/dev/hdc Master disk, secondary bus
/dev/hdd Slave disk, secondary bus
If you're on SCSI it's another ballgame as if, for example, hdd1 has SCSI
id 0 and hdd2 has SCSI ID 1, then hdd1 is /dev/sda and hdd2 is /dev/sdb,
but if you remove hdd1 without installing another disk with SCSI id 0,
hdd2 will become /dev/sda and you'll need to change the entries in
/etc/fstab as well as lilo.conf.
Most recent BIOSes give you a decent flexibility of setting up the boot
order. With lilo correctly configured in the MBR of both disks, you will
have the following choices:
- BIOS set to boot from hdd1 first:
- win98
- potato
- BIOS set to boot from hdd2 first:
- woody
So leave hdd1 alone. Boot into your woody system on hdd2 and edit
/etc/lilo.conf. Suppose your woody disk is the slave disk on the
secondary IDE BUS (/dev/hdd). Include the following entries:
--- begin lilo.conf excerpt ---
# Inform lilo about the disk on which we'll be installing an MBR
disk=/dev/hdd
# The disk we'll be installing to will have the first
# BIOS disk id (0x80) when we try to boot from it,
# because we'll change the BIOS disk order with the BIOS setup
bios=0x80
# Install an MBR on this disk
boot=/dev/hdd
--- end lilo.conf excerpt ---
Save the file and do
/sbin/lilo
That should install an MBR on hdd2 which will be bootable when hdd2 is set
as the first biit disk in the BIOS setup.
Best regards,
| George Karaolides Linustech Advanced Solutions, |
| tel: +357 22 55 61 29 86 Ifigenias Street, 3rd Floor, |
| web: www.linustech.com.cy Strovolos, Nicosia CY 2003, |
| email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Republic of Cyprus. |
