LILO booting probem with 2 partitions.
 

Hello,

I'm new to Linux and I have some problems with lilo. I have 2 slackware partitions (one for testing and the other one for doing serious stuff) on a 40GB hard drive on my Laptop and I want to be able to boot on both.

The problem I have is, only the partiton which is the current root and from where I try to install lilo will work the other one will boot, but during startup, many programs like modprobe, mount, cardmgr, will complain that files are missing (No such files or directory) and the computer will stop booting.

Looks like an access path problem to me, but the 'root' variables in my lilo.conf seems to be ok. I've read the man pages for lilo.conf and the user.tex but didn't find anything very useful for my problem.

By the way, what program is use to read .tex document on unix system? I try tex and latex but got many errors so I ended with a text editor and found many programing codes with the text.

Hmmmm... so much to learn when you start on a new system! :-)


Here is my lilo.conf:

--->

boot = /dev/hda
lba32
prompt
timeout = 50
vga = 773

image = /boot/vmlinuz
root = /dev/hda3
label = slackware_main
read-only

image = /boot/vmlinuz
root = /dev/hda5
label = slackware_test
read-write

--->

/dev/hda3 = 6GB primary type partition
/dev/hda6 = 6GB logical type partition


My Setup:

40GB Western Digital HD
HP P3 700MHz Pavilion Laptop
256 MB RAM


Thanks for any help.

Conveco

I believe in your post hda5 is the 2nd Slackware but you put hda6 in one of the line
telling us its size.

One of the way you can try is to replicate the boot loader in hda5.

You do this by mounting hda5 after booting to hda3, log in as root, and click terminal mode. Then type

mkdir /mnt/hda5
mount /dev/hda5 /mnt/hda5
chroot /mnt/hda5

now you are inside hda5 system so type

lil -b /dev/hda5

This should refresh Lilo in the root partition of hda5 and you will be told of any problem enountered by Lilo.

Lilo does not check your files. Your description would suggest the kernel in hda5 is in trouble to me.

saikee:

Oops! Sorry for the /dev/hda6 ref, my mistake.

Ok thank you for the reply, but I solved my problem soon after my first post by mounting hda5 partition and replace image=/boot/vmlinuz in my lilo.conf for image=/mnt/hda5/boot/vmlinuz.

I think the problem with image=/boot/vmlinuz is when I install lilo, I had hda3 as root and the same kernel was linked for both partition, obviously the kernel from the root partition. Not good! :-)

Now everything is working perfectly I have my drive with 6 partitions on it and I can boot msdos, win2k and 2 linux distros with the lilo boot loader.

I have to say that I like your answer its a very good tip if you want to install lilo for other systems than the root.

Conveco