Hi,

I made a Slackware 10.0 installation with XFS filesystem and setup
all the partitions software raid (/dev/md0, etc...).

Everything works fine, except that I cannot make LILO boot the md0
partition (not /dev/hda or /dev/hdc).

Most documents I've found googling suggest to write boot = /dev/md0
to lilo.conf which tells LILO to use the superblock on the disk.
Unfortunately XFS uses that superblock so it cannot be written by
Lilo.

If I use boot = /dev/hda, LILO successfully boots the system but in
that case if /dev/hda fails, the system cannot boot /dev/hdc directly.
Something like boot=dev/md does not work out.

Is there a way to install LILO for a multiple device using XFS
filesystem?

I know I can try GRUB, but I prefer LILO both because it's out of the
box with Slackware and I am accustomed to it.

Thanks in advance for any kind of help.

Doruk

----------------------------------------
FISEK INSTITUTE - http://www.fisek.org

Doruk Fisek wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I made a Slackware 10.0 installation with XFS filesystem and setup
> all the partitions software raid (/dev/md0, etc...).
>
> Everything works fine, except that I cannot make LILO boot the md0
> partition (not /dev/hda or /dev/hdc).
>
> Most documents I've found googling suggest to write boot = /dev/md0
> to lilo.conf which tells LILO to use the superblock on the disk.
> Unfortunately XFS uses that superblock so it cannot be written by
> Lilo.
>
> If I use boot = /dev/hda, LILO successfully boots the system but in
> that case if /dev/hda fails, the system cannot boot /dev/hdc directly.
> Something like boot=dev/md does not work out.
>

Have you tried

root=/dev/md0

Doruk Fisek wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I made a Slackware 10.0 installation with XFS filesystem and setup
> all the partitions software raid (/dev/md0, etc...).
>
> Everything works fine, except that I cannot make LILO boot the md0
> partition (not /dev/hda or /dev/hdc).
>
> Most documents I've found googling suggest to write boot = /dev/md0
> to lilo.conf which tells LILO to use the superblock on the disk.
> Unfortunately XFS uses that superblock so it cannot be written by
> Lilo.
>
> If I use boot = /dev/hda, LILO successfully boots the system but in
> that case if /dev/hda fails, the system cannot boot /dev/hdc directly.
> Something like boot=dev/md does not work out.
>
> Is there a way to install LILO for a multiple device using XFS
> filesystem?
>
No. The reason being that LILO has no understanding of raid, or even of
filesystems. It just gets told the "physical" (ok not exactly physical, but
IIRC it's IDE C/H/S or equivalent) location on the disk of its map file,
which contains the physical locations of the various boot images.
You could try lilo -b /dev/hda followed by lilo -b /dev/hdc to put a copy on
both disks, then tell the BIOS to boot from hdc if hda fails. I don't
really know whether this would work.