Baslinux mailing list

[James Miller <jamtat AT mailsnare.net>]

On Tue, 7 Dec 2004, sindi keesan wrote:

> Thanks for looking into this.  Actually I wanted to be able to boot DOS,
> BL2 or BL2 without loadlin, on the same computer, with DOS as default.

Either SBM or lilo could do this for you, in theory.  I'll focus on
getting SBM to do it in this note.

> Is sleeping forever something to do with read-write versus read-only?
> When Steven told me how to do DOS/BL3 with lilo I had to specify
> read-write.  BL3 uses rw.  Standard Slackware uses ro, BL2 to HD ro, BL2
> RAMdisk rw (right, Steven?).  Did you specify read-write somewhere when
> setting up lilo?

Eureka!  Changing read-only to read-write in lilo.conf got it booting!  I
thought that might work, but wanted to take some suggestions before trying
it.  Question is, why did the lilo.conf I had say read-only?  I'm assuming
I got it when I pkg'd BL1's lilo.tgz on this system.  While I'm waiting
for an answer to that, as well as to the question which lilo is supposed
to be used with BL3, I'll sketch out preliminarily the process for using
SBM and lilo to boot multiple instances of BL.

Get SBM first, which can run either from DOS or from Linux.  But
installing it should be the last step.  Then, pkg lilo on each of your BL
partitions.  Next, you need to copy over the kernel and put it in the
/boot directory on each BL partition.  Then, you need to edit lilo.conf:
in my lilo.conf, I changed root=CURRENT to root=/dev/hda2 (substitute the
device and partition number your BL was installed to).  I also had to
change read-only to read-write after booting initially failed (sleep
forever after init loaded).  After this you'll need to run lilo on each BL
partition--WITH the following special parameters: -v and -b /dev/hdXX.
-v is for verbose output.  -b is for bootdev, and causes lilo to install
in the first sectors of the (BL) partition you specify.  This makes the
partition bootable with SBM.  Finally, you can install SBM to the mbr and,
when it comes up, you should be able to select and boot straight to your
BL partition using it--works on my machine anyway.

> I thought BL3 came with lilo already.

I didn't find it.  Maybe it comes only with the floppy version?  We still
have to work this out, and to see if the BL1 lilo.tgz is the right one to
use.  I got a lilo.conf after pkg'ing it, and I think maybe I'd have had
to create my own lilo.conf had I pkg'd the one from Slack 4.0.

> How would one remove lilo from the boot sector of a second hard drive?
> Can you do fdisk /mbr with linux fdisk?

Not sure about that.  Overwrite it with something else would be my guess.
I think maybe one can back up the mbr before writing lilo to it so as to
restore it later.  Can't give particulars on that though.

Seems like we're well on the way to booting multiple BL instances using
SBM and lilo now.  Further input?

James