configuring lilo after a recompile

[Hullboy]

Hi

i'm having a problem with lilo on slackware that has consumed quite a lot of my time. i have read the kernel-howto and numerous other guides on the internet, but nothing seems to fit my problem. i hope someone out there can help...........

before i began tinkering my system booted using lilo from a floppy. this has been the same since i installed slackware about 4 months ago.

i have recompiled my kernel and put the resulting bzImage into / as vmlinuz. i edited /etc/lilo.conf to add the new kernel option and left the old one in too (different name and path!). i've ran the command lilo

my bios is set to boot from the floppy first, so i removed that and rebooted. to my surprise, when it booted off the hard drive, i saw the boot screen for mandrake (which i had installed a while back before dumping it for slackware). naturally, the list of kernel options from the mandrake menu wasn't a lot of help, so i had to reboot again from the floppy.

can anyone explain what i need to do to get slackware booting from the mbr? this is a single boot system (no windows).

i suspect this all stems from some installation error i made when installing slackware?

anyway, any advice much appreciated.............

 

[drag]

Lilo installs itself into whats called the Master boot record. This is a reserved portion at the beginning of the harddrive that your bios reads to memory to begin the boot-up of your OS. (also a lot of nasty viruses hide up their). The MBR is not formated normally when you partition a hardrive, MBR is held kinda sacred and you need to go thru special steps to erase it (format it). I had this problem and everyonce in a while on it came to switching a hdd to one OS or another.

The easiest way to fix it is to break out a old DOS boot disk (DOS ISN"T DEAD, you can make a dos bootdisk from a windows machine) with Fdisk on it and boot into dos and pass /mbr to fdisk like such:

a:\> fdisk /mbr

and then run lilo agian.

if that didn't work then this might work, but I am sure there is a better way

 

[Hullboy]

drag

thanks for replying, it's appreciated.

i know what the mbr is, I used it in the sentance:

can anyone explain what i need to do to get slackware booting from the mbr?

what i need to know is : is there a utility within linux that allows the configuration of the mbr or a boot floppy to supply a list of kernel options to boot from as specified in lilo.conf?

if this is not possible, what do I need to manually change to get this show on the road in the proper way (I'd rather not use a dos bootdisk)

at the minute even though i updated my lilo.conf in /etc/ and then ran lilo, I do not get an updated list of options on my boot floppy, and booting from the mbr is way out of synch.

apologies if this was not clear from my first post.

thanks again for any more replies..............

 

[Nothinman]

Check where lilo is putting it boot record according the config file, it's probably set to write it to your root partition instead of the MBR. I havn't used lilo in a while so I don't remember the syntax.

 

[Tiger]

In lilo.conf you have to add a stanza for each OS or distro of linux you want to boot.
If you want LILO installed on the MBR you need to edit lilo.conf to point to the MBR which in LILO speak is /dev/hda, which is the root of the first IDE drive. Everytime you edit lilo.conf you need to re-run /sbin/lilo for the changes to take effect.

 

[Hullboy]

Tiger and nothinman, thanks - you were right on the money......

I had edited lilo.conf, but I hadn't really understood that /dev/hda1 referred to the first partition, /dev/hda2 for the second partition on the first master disk. I put my boot=/dev/hda1, but as I wanted to boot from the hard disk, what I needed was /dev/hda.

Now that I have changed this and re-run lilo, I get a kernel option per stanza, and I even get a fancy boot screen with colour

Thank you to everyone who came to my aid with this problem..........