I now have 2 SCSI drives and 0 IDE drives. The first SCSI drive has LILO, /boot, and C: and D: (both FAT32) for Win95. The second SCSI drive has the other Linux partitions.

I'm wanting to add an IDE drive, and doing so will preclude continuing to boot SCSI. The IDE drive will take over the functions of the first SCSI drive. New Linux partition(s) will be made on the first SCSI drive, and the second SCSI drive will stay the way it is.

How do I get LILO and /boot onto the IDE drive so Linux (or Win95) can start and Linux continue from the second SCSI? Also my current /boot is bigger than it needs to be, so I want to make it smaller on the IDE drive at the same time.

The easiest way would be to set your new IDE as a slave, boot into Linux, create a Linux partition (Ext2, Ext3, etc) on the IDE, mount it, copy the contents of /boot to the new partition, and then install lilo in the MBR of the IDE.

You will have to make modifications in your /etc/fstab and perhaps in lilo.conf.

Don't forget to create a Boot Disk, just in case.
And test everything before erasing the first SCSI drive.


I believe I covered everything.

A CD-ROM drive is now the only IDE device in the system. I was going to let the new drive be primary master and the CD primary slave. I'd rather not use the secondary IDE channel now because it'll be too difficult to get a new cable onto the motherboard.

The BIOS doesn't support a choice of booting IDE or SCSI. As long as no IDE hard drive is present, I'm free to boot SCSI as I do now. But once the hard drive is there, it's mandatory to boot the IDE drive -- or a floppy. The BIOS doesn't support CD booting, and though the SCSI card does, the system doesn't have a SCSI CD-ROM.

lilo.conf will have to be changed due to Win95 moving from SCSI to IDE, and fstab will also have to be changed . These I can do before shutting down Linux for the last time. But copying /boot from SCSI to IDE can't be done except under a floppy boot. And how would I copy LILO from the SCSI to the IDE?