LILO: Two Distros, Separate Drives

General_Tso · 07-31-2003, 01:04 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Skyline
Hi General TSO

Yes - in your scenario - you'll need Red Hat's Boot partition mounted - (when multibooting I've got so used to just using a series of Root partitions and one Swap partition - thats why I was looking at the Root partition earlier - in hindsight in this scenario were youve got a Boot, Root and Swap partition for Red Hat - Red Hat has put its kernel image etc in the separate Boot partition /dev/hda1 - not in the boot directory of its Root partition - so yes - its the boot partition that needs to be mounted)

Can you post your lilo.conf file again - we're nearly there.

Just one last thing - did the Kernel Panic refer to a Root filesystem not being found/mounted ? - if so - and if youve got this line

root=/dev/hda2

in your Red Hat LILO entry - then take it out -

Skyline,

Okay, now we're getting there. First, the exit error I was receiving was "Kernel panic: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel." However, I tried removing the root=/dev/hda2 entry as per your recommendations and I had no kernel panic upon reboot. However, it immediately booted to Red Hat albeit without any apparent errors. This should be a small matter to fix, but I'm going to go ahead and post my lilo.conf to see if there aren't any other mistakes.

It is as follows:

# Support LBA for large hard disks
lba32
#General Section
boot=/dev/hda
timeout=200
default=RedHat9
vga=normal
map=/boot/map
install=/boot/boot-menu.b
# Red Hat Linux 9.0
image=/mnt/rhboot/vmlinuz-2.4.20-8
label=RedHat9
read-only
append="hdc=ide-scsi hdd=ide-scsi root=LABEL=/"
initrd=/mnt/rhboot/initrd-2.4.20-8.img
# Debian GNU/Linux 3.0r1
image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.18-bf2.4
label=DebianWoody
root=/dev/hdb2
read-only

Thanks! I appreciate the help.

Tso

Skyline · 07-31-2003, 08:07 PM

Hi General_Tso

Cool - just to clarify - when you re-boot - are you getitng an option to boot into Red Hat and Debian?

Your default OS is Red Hat- this is specified in your Lilo.conf file in the line

default=

If you want to change this to Debian, there's a few steps :

First - as root user - temporarily mount Red Hats Boot partition
(this enables the map installer /sbin/lilo to have access to the location of the Red Hat kernel when it creates the map.)

Then - edit the default= line in lilo,conf - change it form RedHat9 to DebianWoody

Save lilo.conf

then as root user again - run

/sbin/lilo

re-post and say how you got on

Skyline

General_Tso · 07-31-2003, 11:12 PM

Skyline,

No, the usual LILO menu does not appear at start up. It goes straight to the Red Hat 9 boot up. I've used LILO many times with many distros. This is my first attempt without Linux and some flavor of Windows, however.

--GT

General_Tso · 08-02-2003, 10:37 PM

Folks:

In case anyone has the same problem, I was missing one line "prompt." Everything works fine now. Thanks for all the help, Skyline.

GT

P. S. Here's the lilo.conf:

# Support LBA for large hard disks
lba32
#General Section
boot=/dev/hda
timeout=200
prompt
default=RedHat9
vga=normal
map=/boot/map
install=/boot/boot-menu.b
# Red Hat Linux 9.0
image=/mnt/rhboot/vmlinuz-2.4.20-8
label=RedHat9
read-only
append="hdc=ide-scsi hdd=ide-scsi root=LABEL=/"
initrd=/mnt/rhboot/initrd-2.4.20-8.img
# Debian GNU/Linux 3.0r1
image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.18-bf2.4
label=DebianWoody
root=/dev/hdb2
read-only
append="hdc=ide-scsi hdd=ide-scsi"

Skyline · 08-02-2003, 11:45 PM

Nice.

chongman99 · 08-08-2003, 03:43 AM

General TSO,

Can you do this and report back?

Run:
fsck /dev/hda
type "p"
What does that say?

Do the same for /dev/hdb/.

====

At the moment, are you able to boot into both RH and Debian (with boot disks or off the hard disk)?

====

If you can boot into both of the distros, run this command on each of them:

mount

send back the results, clearly indicating which distro each result is from.

============

Lastly, you mentioned that you get "Kernel Panic". Is that what prints on the screen, or does something else display on your screen, which you are interpreting as "Kernel Panic".

Do you get a LILO prompt or menu screen (mine is red)?

===

Which distro are you booting up currently? I think it's RH, but I want to confirm.
===

I'm not sure if this will help, but it'll give me/us an idea of where your root/boot partitions are AND from which distro/partition you are running LILO.

General_Tso · 08-08-2003, 08:57 AM

No worries, bro. I got it working. See the post above yours.

--GT

chongman99 · 08-08-2003, 12:04 PM

Whoops.

Should've read things more carefully. That's what happens when you get a linux high at 3am in the morning.... You start posting like mad.

Thanks though... I think I'll be having similar problems soon, so this thread helps me a lot.