Lilo problem
 

I have this problem while installing Suse 8.0.The OS gets installed alright but while doing a fdisk -l to see the partition entries,I cannot see the file system on my first hard-disk on which I run windows and also boot as the first boot device.Because of this, cannot install LILO there,so that I do not get the option of booting into two different OSes.Can someone help?

Thanks,
Indraneel.

best way anyway i'd suggest is to have linux as the master drive and install lilo onto that drive. this keeps everything linux totally physically seperate from windows, making removal an utter doddle. swap the drives over and install linux as master, with lilo there.

the only issue you may come across is being able to boot windows. windows doesn't like being on a slave channel, so you just lie to windows to make it think that it is on the master after all. in the /etc/lilo.conf file you'd have a windows section that reads:

other=/dev/hdb1
label=windows
table=/dev/hdb
map-drive=0x80
to=0x81
map-drive=0x81
to=0x80

this just flips the cahnnels over, bringing you back to square one once you've chosen to boot windows.

I agree with acid_kewpie for the "best" solution to your problem. Otherwise you have to mess around with partition resizers to make room on your boot disk for at least a small "boot partition" for your Linux distro. This gets both messy and scary!