hi all,
I have a question on the way LILO works. i have read somewhere that when LILO is installed in the MBR, it does not modify the existing partition table (installed by DOS), and that it lets the "active partition" flag remain as it is.

In that case, how does LILO figure out which OS to boot. In other words, where does it store the "default" OS option specified in the linux.conf?

As I understand it now, I think the MBR code has the location of /boot/boot.b hardcoded into it. boot.b reads the /boot/map, and somewhere inside /boot/map, the options specified in the linux.conf are stored. Am I correct?

Thanks!

-srinivasan

That's roughly how I understand it? - each time you run the map instaler /sbin/lilo an actual boot-loader and a map file are installed in the relevant boot sector - it creates the map file based on the directives contained in lilo.conf, including the default=...... directive - the map file contains the raw hard disk sector numbers of the kernel images etc etc.