Baslinux mailing list

[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

So why did they say it could damage 'the partition' to install lilo?  I 
thought they were talking about crashing the hard disk.

SW81 offered us basic or advanced lilo installation but then scared us 
off.  It did not offer loadlin instead, just 'no boot loader' except for 
the boot floppy with syslinux.

I will look at the lilo setup more closely if we can figure out how to get 
back to it now that we exited setup.

Now we at least have two alternate ways to get into SW81 if lilo fails.

We have just now fixed the loadlin boot problem.  Unlike the case in three 
other computers (which work with loadlin under Win98 DOS but not 
otherwise) this would not boot about half the time even with Win98 DOS. 
In this case 'not an image file' actually meant that the image file was 
corrupted.  Strange that it booted anyway part of the time.
All the linuxes on there now boot with loadlin all of the time.

Syslinux appears not to be intended for use on the hard drive.

On Sat, 4 Dec 2004, James Miller wrote:

> On Sun, 5 Dec 2004, sindi keesan wrote:
>
> > What exactly can lilo do to damage the partition?  Is this software or
> > hardware damage?  It is one of our larger nicer drives.
>
> I think this is just a warning for Windows users, who might have
> difficulty booting their Windows if Lilo takes over the mbr (unless they
> know how to edit lilo.conf).  You could try installing lilo in the
> superblock of its partition rather than in the mbr, then using smb to boot
> your Linux partition.  If you look on the web you can find out how to
> install lilo to the superblock from the command line--I recall the bootit
> boot loader having an item on this in their FAQ.  A Slack or other major
> distro install should give you this option on installation: it should ask
> you where to install lilo--to the mbr or to the partition.  Maybe that
> could address this machine's problems?
>
> James
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keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org