Hi there,

I'll share this as the question appears frequently.

Last night I installed slack-10.1 to an old pII/266 box, bare metal
install to 13GB HDD. Too tired, I shutdown midway through setting
up a custom kernel. This morning, turn on machine, am greeted by:

Loading SlackEBDA is big; kernel setup stack overlaps LILO second stage
..

Oops? WTF? What I'd done is upgrade kernel to 2.4.31 from
slack-current and forgot to run lilo

Fix? Easy! Boot from install CD, fdisk -l, then I remember why
I'm in habit of marking '/' or '/boot' 'active' --> reminds me where
to start search for current distro In this case the '*' was
a 3GB /dev/hda3, has to be /.

Mount /dev/hda3 to /mnt, chroot to /mnt, edit /etc/lilo.conf[1],
run 'lilo -v' successfully[2], exit, reboot, all fixed )

[1] I not use /boot symlinks, so I append "-ide-2.4.31" to vmlinuz,
most will not need perform this step.

Similar issue if using separate /boot and slack install confused,
edit lilo.conf and tell it correct boot + root locations, run
lilo -v, reboot.

[2] Ignore lilo's warning message re: /proc not mounted, harmless.

--Grant.

il 10 giu 2005 (ven) 08:30:22 +1000
Grant Coady <grant_lkml@dodo.com.au> ha scritto:

> Oops? WTF? What I'd done is upgrade kernel to 2.4.31 from
> slack-current and forgot to run lilo
>
> Fix? Easy! Boot from install CD, fdisk -l, then I remember why
> I'm in habit of marking '/' or '/boot' 'active' --> reminds me where
> to start search for current distro In this case the '*' was
> a 3GB /dev/hda3, has to be /.
>
> Mount /dev/hda3 to /mnt, chroot to /mnt, edit /etc/lilo.conf[1],
> run 'lilo -v' successfully[2], exit, reboot, all fixed )

Not to open a flame, but maybe grub would be the right choice...why
Patrick would not set it as default bootloader?

On Fri, 10 Jun 2005 10:37:56 +0000, Sebastiano wrote:

> il 10 giu 2005 (ven) 08:30:22 +1000
> Grant Coady <grant_lkml@dodo.com.au> ha scritto:
>
><snip>
>
> Not to open a flame, but maybe grub would be the right choice...why
> Patrick would not set it as default bootloader?

I stick with lilo because of the following:

I dual boot linux and windows at work. I had always done this with
slackware/lilo, but I have a REALLY fast internet connection and wanted to
give Debian a try. Debian uses Grub. I decided after awhile I wanted to
go back to slack and put my install CD in the drive and rebooted. I
install the bootloader to the MBR.

The CD drive decided 1/2 way through that it could not read from the
disk and the install failed. This after allready reformating the
previous Debian install. Since the grub boot loader was still installed,
I was unable to boot the computer - either OS - until the following day
when I had a disk that COULD be read all the way through to the lilo
install.

Lilo does not have this problem in that once you run lilo, the config in
/etc is not needed. Lilo will be there regardless of what you do to any of
the OS's it is responsible for booting including the one where lilo.conf
lives.

There are other reasons too, but this was a big one for me.

On Fri, 10 Jun 2005 10:37:56 GMT, Sebastiano <seba@slack.home> wrote:
>
>Not to open a flame, but maybe grub would be the right choice...why
>Patrick would not set it as default bootloader?

Grub writes to cylinder one, sectors 2..63 as do some windows
utilities, therefore grub is useless in multi-boot environment.

Is broken b0rked stupid syntax -- did I mention broken?

Lilo simply works, why change to a faulty bootloader?

--Grant.

il 10 giu 2005 (ven) 11:27:24 GMT
Grant Coady <grant_lkml@dodo.com.au> ha scritto:

> On Fri, 10 Jun 2005 10:37:56 GMT, Sebastiano <seba@slack.home> wrote:
> >
> >Not to open a flame, but maybe grub would be the right choice...why
> >Patrick would not set it as default bootloader?
>
> Grub writes to cylinder one, sectors 2..63 as do some windows
> utilities, therefore grub is useless in multi-boot environment.

what do you mean by useless? I use it for multi booting 3 os...
Doi you found that is easy with lilo managing two or more distro's
installed? You should keep a copy on the mbr, then a copy on the master
partition of each distro, unless you copy all the kernels and initrds
in one directory...I don't think it's so useful, the stupid syntax of
grub in that case allow to boot on the fly from virtually every
partition you have....and it fits obviously on a floppy, in case of
emergency

Sebastiano wrote:

> Not to open a flame, but maybe grub would be the right choice...why
> Patrick would not set it as default bootloader?

Usually, my first step after a Slack install is replacing LILO by GRUB.
Great bootloader, though Grant has a point: the guy who invented this
inconsistent syntax deserves to be shot.

But...

GRUB supports neither RAID nor LVM... in that case you have to stick to
LILO. As for flaming or not, my policy is: try out everything... and then
stick to the thing that appeals most.

Cheers,

Niki Kovacs
--
I'm not as think as you stoned I am.

On Fri, 10 Jun 2005 22:37:21 +0200, Niki Kovacs <mickey@mouse.com> wrote:
>
> Usually, my first step after a Slack install is replacing LILO by GRUB.
> Great bootloader, though Grant has a point: the guy who invented this
> inconsistent syntax deserves to be shot.

winnt boot.ini for ntldr:

default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOW S
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Micro ...

Both winnt and grub enumerate partitions at boot time. That
explains the odd syntax... Sort of a 'compile-time knowledge'
vs 'run-time discovery' argument that gets too technical.

Bottom line? Does your system boot as you expect? If it does,
you using chosen bootloader correctly. Don't matter which one.

--Grant.