hi

i am currently booting yo linux from floppy, and i need to enable scsi emulation for ide, and also to enable the framebuffer.

in my normal lilo.conf on /boot i have included the lines

append=" hdc=ide-scsi "
and
vga=791

both of which work fine, but i think lilo works differently when booting from floppy, so how do i change and effect the lilo.conf on my boot floppy?

As long as the kernel image to boot is on the HDD, I believe that they should work. Incidently, which distro are you using as I've always found my lilo.conf file in /etc.

sorry, i'm a prat, yeah it's /etc of course.

sorry, but what does 'they should work' mean?? i know they work when i boot from hard disk, but i need to know how to update lilo on disk, cos floppies don't have MBR's do they..?

The only boot disk I've ever used is the one you can setup on installation of Linux (Mandrake, in my case). I believe that this simply has a lilo.conf file that points to the kernel image on the HDD, rather than having another image on the floppy, in which case, I believe that simply adding the lines to the lilo.conf file on your floppy will work just as well as if you were actually booting from the HDD (as, in theory, you are). If I'm wrong, then my most sincere appologies for wasting your time - in which case, I shall be learning something aswell.

nrrg...

i use a boot disk as lilo on my system is defaulted to windwos, and i can't change it, and i've got andditional hardware, which slows the boot down, so by putting in a boot disk, i can go to the loo while linux boots!

i've tried running lilo to update the boot disk, created using mkbootdisk, but it always complains that various files aren't where they should be, which i can see, cos the fs would look different at boot time, as it wouldn't have mounhted /dev/hda5 or anything.. my floppy lilo says:

boot=/dev/fd0H1440
timeout=100
message=/boot/message
prompt
image=/vmlinuz-2.4.8-22mdk
label=linux
root=/dev/hda5
append=" hdc=ide-scsi "
initrd=/initrd.img

but simply changing the append line doesn't affect it. I know if it's on a HD then you need to run lilo, but i thought i read somewhere that you don't on a floppy, cos there's no MBR to update....
naturally, all paths listed are relative to the floppy disk, not the normal file system...

so what do i need to do to make my changes in lilo.conf have effect?

Why can't you use the lilo on your hard drive to boot into linux and why can't you change the default from windows to linux?

It's true there is no mbr on the floppy, but there is a boot sector that lilo gets written to.

When I had TurboLinux installed, I made a boot disk using mkbootdisk. I looked at the mkbootdisk file and found it to be a script file. The file used the command /sbin/lilo -r /mount_point to set up lilo on the floppy. Try it, but change ' /mount_point ' to where you mount the floppy. Let's say you mount it in the ' /mnt/floppy ' directory. Then it would be /sbin/lilo -r /mnt/floppy.

i can't change lilo on my HD, as my girlfriend doesn't understand linux, and gets scared when windows isn't around....

and i have an IDE pci controller, which takes time to scan drives, which i don't want to wait for, so a boot disk fixes both problems.

OK? :-)
right, so i'm trying to update the floppy then...

lilo -r /mnt/floppy

which is the right location, but despite being root, and the device is:

brwxrwxrwx 1 root root 2, 28 Apr 14 2001 /dev/fd0H1440

i keep getting permission denied errors... The disk is entire writeable to root as well...

any ideas?

First, mount the floppy disk then check your /mnt and /floppy directories to see if the permissions are correct. Do an ls -l /mnt and an ls -l /mnt/floppy. You'll need to have read and write permission. If you don't, then use chmod u+rw /mnt and chmod u+rw /mnt/floppy.