lilo Booting w/ LILO

[V.T. Eric Layton]

Here's another of those "I sure do miss Bruno" topics...

 

Are there any LILO experts out here at Scot's these days? I've never been a LILO fan for multiple booting (beyond two OS's). It works like a champ on my laptop (dual boot) and even on my shop system (multiboot), but I've never been able to get it to work on my main system for some reason.

 

I have a complicated fdisk layout on this system. I have three drives (non-RAID) running with numerous partitions on each. It's always been problematic to get LILO to properly recognize the drives/partitions and boot my multiple operating systems properly. Last night, I got the closeest I've ever come.

 

I was able to boot Slackare (LILO - MBR controller on /dev/sda1) perfectly. However, when I tried to boot Arch (dev/sda5), CentOS (/dev/sdb6), Debian (dev/sdb8), Mint (/dev/sdb10), and Salix (/dev/sdb12), they would boot, but I had no keyboard or mouse at the RL3 command line.

 

I tried to get LILO to boot the initrds by adding an initrd line to lilo.conf, but then /sbin/lilo gave errors when running and only registered Slackware; leading me to believe that it never got to where it was booting the initrd. I believe that if I could get it to properly boot the initrds, it would have the USB keyboard and mouse support once booted.

 

Any thoughts on what I'm doing wrong here?

[burninbush]

Any thoughts on what I'm doing wrong here? >Eric

 

++++++++++++++

 

Not without seeing your lilo.conf file.

 

I imagine you already know that you have to run lilo again after any change to lilo.conf. And if you don't want to use the default location (/etc/lilo.conf) then you have to tell it with a -c switch where to find the lilo.conf you want it to use.

 

Actually, my best advice is to switch everything to grub classic. Or, on windows boxes, where I use grub4dos, which works the same as grub classic. One of the prime features IMO of grub classic is the easy switch to command mode, wherein you can probe the system for the files it wasn't able to find in auto mode.

 

You can even do it as a temporary switch -- you have 3 hard drives you could make bootable.

Edited July 8, 2012 by burninbush

[V.T. Eric Layton]

After giving up on LILO in Slackware yesterday, bb, I deleted the lilo.conf. I can give you an idea of what it looked like, though. Oh, and I'm already using (and prefer GRUB 0.97 (Legacy). It's just that it is Arch's GRUB. So far, I haven't found a GRUB SlackBuild for Slackware that will compile properly. If I could get GRUB to install in Slack, that would be the way I'd go. Anyway, my lilo.conf looked something like this:

 

# Default OS section

image = /boot/vmlinux

label = "Slackware"

root = /dev/sda1

initrd = /boot/initrd.gz

read-only

 

# Non-Linux OS section

other=/dev/sdb1

label="WindowsXP"

table=/dev/sdb

master-boot

 

# Other Linux OS

image = /boot/vmlinux-linux

label = "Arch"

root = /dev/sda5

initrd = /boot/initramfs.img

read-only

 

then four more for CentOS, Debian, Mint, and Salix.

 

They all booted (didn't try Windows, come to think of it), but no mouse or keyboard after boot.

[burninbush]

If I could get GRUB to install in Slack, that would be the way I'd go. >eric

 

+++++++++++++

 

?? But why do you need grub installed on Slack? You only need it installed on your boot drive -- all other distros are just edited into the one install's menu.lst. Doesn't matter at all which distro originally installed it.

 

I'll take the opportunity [again] to pitch a disk layout that makes sense for a linux experimenter: make one small [2gb?] first partition on a drive that will be your permanent boot partition, install grub on it, and thereafter when you install some new distro, just say no to installing any boot code. Or if the install insists, tell it to install to the partition's root, after which you will ignore it. The 2gb part will still be mostly empty, so here is a place to put a frugal install of pmagic, Hiren's boot CD, etc.

 

I have maybe 8 distros installed on each of my two desktops here, and NEVER have to screw with booting. It's wise to keep a copy of the disk's MBR saved on some other media, for those times when some new distro disregards instructions and overwrites your MBR anyway.

 

Booting slack is the easiest of all -- no initrd if you use the huge kernel.

 

Title slack 13.37 32bit

root (hd0,3)

kernel /boot/vmlinuz ro root=/dev/sda4

boot

[V.T. Eric Layton]

Maybe I'm misundstanding you here... are you saying that you can install GRUB on a partition by itself without an operating system? I guess if you can put GRUB on a floppy or CD, you should be able to just as easily install it on a small partition of your hard drive. Interesting idea. Unfortunately for me, I cannot at this point be creating partitions on my drives. The partition scheme is set and done. So... maybe I'll put GRUB on USB stick instead?

 

Oh, and Slack boots fine with LILO. It's the other Linuxes that have no mouse/keyboard once they're booted.

[securitybreach]

Hmm, I have not used Lilo since my Slackware days so I am not really for sure where to begin. That said, I am sure you will figure it out though

[V.T. Eric Layton]

With Arch behaving now, I probably won't need to worry about it for a while.

[burninbush]

Maybe I'm misundstanding you here... are you saying that you can install GRUB on a partition by itself without an operating system? I guess if you can put GRUB on a floppy or CD, you should be able to just as easily install it on a small partition of your hard drive. Interesting idea. >eric

 

+++++++++++

 

Yes ... the partition must be formatted with some filesystem that grub knows [vfat, all linux types, iso9660, and??] and it has to be marked bootable [at partition time]. At that point, grub can be installed to it. I like to use vfat, in particular because there are tiny text editors and other useful utils that run on fat. You'll want at least a text editor to fiddle with menu.lst and other setup files [e.g., autoexec.bat, config.sys -- optional, but useful]. And vfat works fine for frugal installs of special purpose distros -- like Hirens BootCD, which includes the pmagic distro and tons of other small utils.

 

Know that when you boot grub and while you interact with it, grub is the only code running until it decides to copy some vmlinuz [and maybe initrd] to memory. It knows about file systems, in it's peculiar terminology.

 

Then, use some linux partition tool to make the rest of the disk as you like. You just won't ever have to struggle with booting again so long as you don't destroy that first little partition.

 

I invented this scheme after about my 10th linux install, way back when -- to keep my sanity. "How to boot" is an ongoing problem with linux -- my layout goes a long way to eliminating that stress.

[V.T. Eric Layton]

Very interesting, bb. When Slackware comes out with its next stable release, I may reformat/repartiion my main drive and try this method you've told me about. I can't believe I haven't thought about doing this before. *smacking self in head*

 

Thanks!

 

When the time comes, I'll let you know how it goes. I may even redo my shop system soon just to experiment. LILO is OK, but GRUB 0.97 is ever so much gooder, in my opinion.