Baslinux mailing list

[James Miller <jamtat AT mailsnare.net>]

I've been fiddling a bit with lilo in an attempt to boot multiple
instances of BL3 as Sindi has wanted to do.  First, let me just confirm
which version of lilo relates to BL3.  Is it the one from BL1?  I didn't
see any lilo download at the BL3 add-ons site.

In principle, lilo can boot other instances of Linux on the same
system--provided that each instance has lilo installed in the first
sectors (called "superblock" I think) of its root filesystem partition.
A more convoluted way, it seems, is to keep all kernels in the /boot
directory on the main partition and specify both the kernel image and root
filesystem location in lilo.conf.

However, it seems that the lilo for BL1 is some sort of trimmed down
version (isn't it, Steven?), so it might not work for this.  When I
installed it and edited lilo.conf to add my DOS partition, when I went to
run lilo, I was told chain.b was missing.  So it couldn't add the DOS
partition.  Maybe there would be a similar limitations to adding other
instances of BL3/Linux to it?

Undaunted, I decided to forge ahead using SBM--Smart Boot Manager.  I
looked over some lilo documentation and discovered that the way to install
lilo to the superblock is, apparently, by using the -b option (bootdev)
and specifying the device and partition number.  In my case I used lilo -v
-b /dev/hda2 .  It seemed to work in the sense of writing lilo to the
first sectors of my BL3 partition.

However, trying to boot that partition using SBM gets only partway done,
then stalls.  It gets as far as mounting the filesystem readonly, frees
unused memory, then starts init.  But right after that (i.e., after the
Busybox line) I get

------------------------------------------
No more tasks for init -- sleeping forever
------------------------------------------

and it hangs there.

Seems like I've made progress toward booting multiple instances of BL3,
but am not quite there yet.  Any ideas why I get this "sleeping forever"
message and what to do about it?

Thanks, James