multibooting
 

I've got mandriva installed using the mbr and I've installed a new distro on my hard drive and chose to install to the root partition instead of the mbr. I've previously had problems trying to sort out lilo for several distros so thought I'd try it a different way. So how do I boot the second distro I've got (Kanotix)? An easy reply would be appreciated.

have you got a bootdisk? This is a crummy work around: install grub or lilo after you get in.

If you still have mandriva and want to boot it aswell, then the best way would be to edit your bootloader configuration, either by booting into mandriva and adding a kanotix entry, or booting into kanotix yadda yadda.

links:
http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html

google for lilo howtos.

titanium_geek

Thanks for the reply. I added kanotix to my lilo.config file and ran lilo. I can boot it but it gets stuck part way through saying kernel panic. I think there must be a problem I need to sort out. It works fine as a live cd.

If I understand your post correctly, you have lilo on the mbr (Mandrake) and lilo on the / partition of Kanotix and both of these are active. You should only have one active lilo.

I would disable the Kanotix lilo and configure the Mandrake lilo to boot Kanotix. If you go with this plan, go into the Kanotix lilo.conf and copy the entry to boot the Kanotix partition, you'll need that information (modified) to add to the Mandrake lilo.

Kanotix only seems to have grub as the option so I've reinstalled it on the mbr. I booted into mandrake from the cd and added the entries for kanotix to the grub file. So I can now use either distro. Thanks for your help.