Hi,
I've juste installed Basic linux on a native partition but I can't boot on it, I don't know How to find a LILO or GRUB, as the other partition is dos native but have nothing on it...............
Does anyone knows How to boot directly on the HD instead of floppy??

Your BIOS should have a option for the first device to boot.

Do you use mandrake 9.1 also? If you are new to linux I suggest that you use one of the big distro's like RedHat or Mandrake (Suse?) and other that automagically installs a bootmenu.

-Not that you can't solve your problem it's just that the big distros are really easy to get running thanks to the bootmenus they come with.

Its seems strange that Basic Linux can't set itself up to boot ..? If you want to use this we will need more info...

Have you tried: http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/grub.html ?

greetings, kamstrup

well......, actually, I wanted to use this distrib on a p75Mhz 16Meg RAM (portable), so it's why I didn't use mandrake 9.1 or any other big distro

I already use mandrake 9.1 on one of my computer and I've seen how it can be easy, but there, I'm looking for the tinyest distro that support X........... Somebody told me about basic linux but I'm open to any other suggestion...

ps: I forgot to tell that I can't manage to access to the BIOS, but it wouldn't help, because it already seeks on the HD but doesn't find any filesystem...

Ahhhh. I see. Have you actually tried lilo or grub (is it them that can't find the filesys?) It sounds like you maybe have some old (win/dos?)-bootloader installed. What exactly does it say when it can't find the filesys?

As I remember it is rather easy to make a floppy with grub, boot this and then transfer grub (it has some autoconfig stuff if I recall correct) to your bootsector.

greetings, kamstrup

Well, actually, it's what I intend to do but I don't know how...

I can actually start Basic Linux via floppy by loading it on RAM, and then mounting the device /dev/hda5
actually, the disk was partitioned whith a primary dos partition (/dev/hda1) and the ext2 was next... as I started, after seeking for BOOt records, the computer crashed telling me that there weren't any system installed

I think that effectively Grub would help me a lot but I don't know how to install and configure it...

By the way, do you know any site that would give me a full description of shell commands?

Thanks a lot

I've tried both lilo and grub. Back in the ol' days I thought grub was the better but over the past year I've shifted back to lilo. So I'll give you some instructions on how to get lilo running (whether you need them or not, hehe):

First you need some packages to even compile it:
- ld.so1-1.9.11-10mdk.i586.rpm
- libc-base-5.3.12-38mdk.i586.rpm
- nasm-0.98-1.i386.rpm
- dev86-0.15.0-2.i386.rpm

I found all these using google (should be easy). Now download the lilo source from: http://www.icewalkers.com/download/lilo/943/dls/

Compile and install it (make all; make install). Then just run 'lilo'. I got something like:

Fatal: /boot/message is too big (> 65535 bytes)

This has probably something to do with the image the lilo is told to show at startup... I changed my symlink /boot/message from pointing to /boot/message-graphic to /boot/message-text. By:

cd /boot
mv message message-old
ln -s message-text message

Then I could run 'lilo' with no errors. I about to rebbor now. I'll be back with the results (if I'm able to boot at all). If I haven't confirmed this post in 15 minutes I have not been able to boot :-)

greetings, kamstrup

It worked!

It is just i small issue that my boot-menu now looks rather ugly since it is asci-graphics now, hehe. I will try to switch my /boot/message to point to /boot/message-graphic without running lilo again, and see if I'm able to start lilo even though it gave the error I pointed out in my previous post... If not back in 10 minutes.... You know what happened!

kamstrup, Venturing into the unknown...

Still able to boot, though the boot menu is still asci...
I havent got much time so I'll look into this later. I don't get why updating to a newer version of lilo could cause problems with the graphical boot-menu.

I'll be bak! kamstrup