need lilo stanza for suse

eclectic4 · 08-05-2006, 07:05 PM

Hello folks,

This is my first post in LQ.

I've been using Mandriva Linux as my full time desktop for about six weeks now, after about six years of trying to get off my Windows habit.

I'm running Mandriva on a dual boot with Windows, which I hardly ever use now, with both OSs' on hda.

This week I installed Suse 10.1 on hdb, and then had much trouble, some my own fault and some not, getting the bootloader set up to load both Linux distros, and got locked out of both for a while.

I've gotten it fixed to where I have Mandriva booting like normal now, so what I need is the information to enter into Mandriva's lilo setup, so that it will let me select Suse- the correct lilo stanza(s) to boot Suse. I neglected to copy that info down when I was running Suse.

I just spent an hour searching the web for "suse 10.1 lilo stanza" etc., to no avail.

I tried to mount the (two) Suse partions in Mandriva to search there for the information, but I only succeeded getting access to the second, /home, partition, and not hdb1, / .

Thanks!

bigrigdriver · 08-06-2006, 05:46 AM

You may have that information in the SuSE installation, unless 10.X is very different from 9.3. Look in /usr/share/doc/packages/lilo. There are several READMEs and a sample lilo config.

eclectic4 · 08-06-2006, 05:47 PM

Thanks, Driver. Your hint put me on the trail to the solution, part of which at least was there on my Suse installation.

The documents themselves were not really any help, though. Perhaps if I would have spent the afternoon reading and digesting them, but I doubt it.

I found /etc/lilo.conf on Suse, left by one of my failed attempts, I believe, and got the Suse stanza info out of that.

My first attempts were rejected by the system; then I found out at the web site troubleshooters.com/linux/lilo.htm that I had to mount the Suse partition in Mandriva's /mnt directory, and put that address in lilo.conf. So it looks like this:

Code:

image=/mnt/suse/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.16.13-4-smp
        label="suse_linux"
        root=/dev/hdb1
        initrd=/mnt/suse/boot/initrd-2.6.16.13-4-smp
        append=" showopts resume=/dev/hda8 splash=silent"
        vga=788

What seems odd to my incomplete understanding of the system is that the boot process continues to find /mnt/suse/boot/ every time, although that directory is not yet permanantly set to mount (in /etc/fstab), and so that drive is not found by, for example, the gui, after rebooting, without mounting it by hand again.

It also seems odd to me that instructions on how to do this were not easier to find, for surely systems running multiple Linux distros are relatively common.

eclectic4 · 08-18-2006, 03:12 PM

Well, I'm so thoroughly comfortable with daily Linux use now that I discovered only the other day that the above struggle with bootloaders had left my Windows XP Pro SP2 installation unable to boot up.

The install CD for XP was made to upgrade from '98 or whatever, so it cannot boot from the cd, or I'd try to use that to repair (the MBR?), and then maybe run the Mandriva install disk again to re-repair LILO. I need to find out what to do about this, cause every once in a while I need to use windoze.