Re: booting from a boot diskette

[Alejandro González Hernández - Imoq <imoq imoqland com>]

rpjday wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 11 Jun 2001, Alejandro González Hernández - Imoq wrote:
> 
> > rpjday wrote:
> > >
> > >   i just installed 7.1 on a laptop that already has 7.0 so,
> > > out of sheer laziness, i dumped 7.1 into a couple new partitions,
> > > / and /boot, and didn't install LILO but told the install program
> > > to create a boot disk during the LILO configuration phrase.
> > >
> > >   tried to boot from the diskette, got something like
> > >
> > >   "Boot failed: insert another disk ..."
> > >
> > > what gives?  i thought the whole point of creating that boot diskette
> > > was that i didn't have to mess with LILO at all.
> > >
> > >   i mounted the boot floppy -- sure enough, it looks like a
> > > respectable SYSLINUX floppy.  mounted the two new partitions from
> > > 7.0, they look fine.
> > >
> > >   what did i forget?  shouldn't this have worked?
> >
> > Same thing happened to me yesterday, I installed a win98-win2k-rh71
> > workstation, first installed Linux, made the bootdisk, then win98+win2k
> > surelly erased LILO, tried to use the bootdisk and got the "Boot failed:
> > insert another disk..." message.
> >
> > Anyway, I just used the cd boot and typed "linux rescue", chroot'ed to
> > /mnt/sysimage and re-ran lilo.
> 
> waitaminnit.  why would you have to re-run lilo?  the whole point of
> this exercise was so that i wouldn't have to have lilo involved in
> the boot process *at* *all*.  the installation guide with 7.1 is
> very clear about this.  on p. 56,
> 
> "... if you have Windows NT installed on your system, you may not want
> to install LILO.  If you choose not to install LILO for this reason,
> make sure that you have chosen to create a boot disk ..."
> 
> this suggests that i have no need for lilo if i use a boot disk.
> so re-running lilo should definitely not be a solution to this
> problem.  something else is clearly at fault, and it's disturbing
> that the boot disk that is created at install time obviously
> does not work.
> 
> i'm open to suggestions.

And why not? :)

LILO is far more useful (and less risky) than floppy. You can install
LILO, add the NT partition as one of the options and voila!

It probably is not what you are looking for, but it works for me, I have
to chose in LILO between linux and windows, and if I chose windows, I
have to chose between windows 2000 and windows 98, and that's all, not a
big deal.

Anyway, here is my lilo.conf, in case it can be of help to you:

boot=/dev/hda
map=/boot/map
install=/boot/boot.b
prompt
timeout=50
message=/boot/message
linear
default=linux
 
image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.2-2
        label=linux
        read-only
        root=/dev/hda10
        append="hdc=ide-scsi"
 
other=/dev/hda1
        optional
        label=win2k

Alex.