I have fedora 2 on 2 systems. I want both to be able to boot with out a keyboard. The hardware is different and one will boot with no keyboard and the other will not. Currently I have lilo on both and the one that will not boot will get stuck with the LI on the screen. My guess is that this has somthing to do with the bios. Is there a way for lilo to override this, or is this a hardware limitation??

edfinegan; not to up on everything so here is my take on helping u. most os may not operate without kybd it is an essential device with operational
protocol. most may operate without mouse but not kybd. so that may be where u'll have to check bios and hardware. advice: check http://HOWTO/HARDWARE-HOWTO/index compatibilty kybd,s and systems.
please expand each section pertaining to device for more detail information.
may find solution!

That is generally a BIOS issue like you thought.

It seems older hardware is more likely to not boot without a keyboard, from my experience newer motherboards don't seem to mind.

I have read that some motherboards that won't boot without a keyboard have an option in the BIOS to not do a keyboard check at boot. Turning that option off should fix the problem, but to the best of my memory, I have never seen a BIOS that actually had that option.

So if you are lucky, there will be an option to disable this, and you can boot without the keyboard. If you aren't lucky, I'm not sure what you can do, other than maybe plugging in a keyboard and then removing it after the machine actually starts to boot the OS.

This "problem" is completely up to your BIOS. Most server class hardware is designed to boot keyboardless, or at least ignore a missing keyboard. Most newer versions of a BIOS will allow the boot process to ignore keyboard errors.

I've only seen the "LI" boot issue in LILO when you try to image the hard drive from one drive to another, especially with Ghost.

Do you mean this system (the one that comes up with LI ) boots up fine when you connect a keyboard to it?

I did use ghost on them. However I think that once a keyboard is plugged in they work. I can't test that now to double check but in a few hours I will and post my results.

Thanks

Yeah, I've seen that with ghost. There's a bunch of switches you need to put in your ghost command for it to work. I can't remember them, sorry...

Ok, still using ghost i was able to make it work. Before i was using grub, i switched to lilo and then after the install from ghost was finished i booted with a rescue cd and did a /sbin/lilo to rebuild the mbr. rebooted the system and it works with and with out a keyboard. Not really sure what the difference is between lilo and grup but lilo did the trick.