Interesting Install Situation

Bigun · 08-17-2005, 08:13 AM

I have a laptop that has no CD-rom, I mounted the hard drive into my current system via a USB carriage. After that the hard drive was recognized as "/dev/sdb" in my system. Installation proceeded as normal.

After the installation, I was left with installing LILO... here's where I run into two potential problems. But first, my LILO.CONF:

Code:

boot=/dev/sdb
default=gentoo
lba32

image=/boot/kernel-genkernel-x86-2.6.12-gentoo-r9
  label=gentoo
  read-only
  root=/dev/ram0
  append="init=/linuxrc ramdisk=8192 real_root=/dev/hda1"
  initrd=/boot/initramfs-genkernel-x86-2.6.12-gentoo-r9

First problem: If I set the "boot=" parameter to "/dev/hda", it will install LILO to *my* drive instead of the remote drive. Will this effect the booting when it's put back in the laptop and recognized as "/dev/hda"?

Second problem: This is an older system. I don't think it was meant to handle the drive I'm putting in it (20 Gb). Would this cause a problem?

At any rate, the result of me booting is as such:

Code:

L 40 40 40 40

With a half of a page of 40's. Would either of the two situations cause this error?

Bigun · 08-17-2005, 08:53 AM

Apparently the boot parameter is only used once... whenever /sbin/lilo is ran, that's where the MBR goes. I put the Hard drive into another computer, and it booted without a hitch. I believe it is a BIOS problem. How do I fix this?

tredegar · 08-17-2005, 11:43 AM

Hmm,

You've managed to get me a little confused here: I'm not quite sure which drive is which, or just what you wish to achieve, but if you look at man lilo, theres an option for lilo to install the boot loader wherever you want it to go eg

lilo -b /dev/hda

You seem to have installed the bootloader to whatever drive you can boot when you put it into another computer: Is this the USB drive?. Which drive do you want the MBR to be on? The laptop's? Then you should probably use the lilo command above.

Hope this helps.

Bigun · 08-17-2005, 02:42 PM

That did help. But I still get the "L 40 40 40" error. I'm really starting to believe it is due to the BIOS's limitations. Anyway LILO can override BIOS's settings?