Lilo boot on two hard drives
 

I'm a total newbie to linux so forgive my ignorance but I have two harddrives in my pc. One of them I have my XP installation and the other I used as a spare until I installed Slackware onto it just yesterday.

The install went well, and when I rebooted it came up with the LILO screen. However the only option available to me on that screen was Linux. For some reason it hadn't found my XP hdd which is bootable.

When going back into KDE I found something called a Boot Manager (LILO) so I ran it and use the "Probe" function in it to see if perhaps it wouldn't detect my XP hdd there. Well it found a few things including an entry called "NT" which I thought was my XP hdd so I saved the settings (after which I encountered a warning) and rebooted still to find Linux as the only option.

Is it possible to enable my XP hdd to display at the LILO prompt? I don't want to have to change my IDE cables everytime I want to switch between Operating Systems.

in you /etc/lilo.config file you can edit boot options, like which partitions to boot from. Post that up here and lets see what we can do to get you up and running.

Thanks for your quick reply. Unfortunately I'm currently at work at the moment and my Linux installation is at home so I can only post my /etc/lilo.config file tomorrow. If you could have a look at it then I would greatly appreciate it.

The catch might be that my Linux installation is on a totally seperate harddrive, not a partition. I'm not sure if LILO can support multiple hardrives. Thats what has been said to me anyway. But I'd like to get a second opinion.

prompt
timeout=50
default=Windows
boot=/dev/hda
map=/boot/map
install=/boot/boot.b
message=/boot/message
lba32

image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.24
label=Linux
initrd=/boot/initrd-2.4.24.img
read-only
append="hdc=ide-scsi root=LABEL=/"

other=/dev/hdb1
optional
label=Windows
map-drive=0x80
to=0x81
map-drive=0x81
to=0x80


This is how it sholud look like... (more or less)
I have Linux on master IDE disk & WinXP on slave IDE disk.
Notice:
Now i didn't quite understand is the problem that window doesn't boot right or there isn't windows option at all in LILO.

And don't forget to run or after you edit your lilo.conf

Also you have to be root to edit /etc/lilo.conf

thanks very much, will give it a try tonight.

The problem is that Windows XP doesn't appear in the LILO boot menu at all. But this looks like it could work.

Just remembered its Friday here so I won't be at work tomorrow, will let u know if it worked on Monday.

Thanks once again.

Problem solved. Thanks very much for your help. I just reinstalled Slackware and edited my lilo.conf file with my XP HDD's details and now it works.

Respect.