I don't know how you would go about hiding the windows option from your bootloader menu, but you could restrict access to it by placing a password on it, or as you suggested rename the entry itself.
There are several ways to go about this:
1) You can edit lilo though the GUI tool webmin.
- open a browser (for instance Mozilla or konqueror) and in the web address bar type:
http://localhost:10000
- you will be brought to a login screen where you will be asked to log in, you can use the username: "root" - and for the password: (whatever your root password is) --note: if nothing comes up you probably do not have webmin installed, it is a very useful tool and if you don't mind it on your system I would highly suggest you install it - visit
www.webmin.com for more info.
- you should be brought to the webmin page.
- select the Hardware tab.
- select the Linux Bootloader Configuration, this is the configuration editor for lilo.
- you will be presented with several icons that represent the various boot options present on your system, the one you will want to click on will most likely be labeled "windows"
- here you will have the option of changing the name that appears in the bootloader selection or changing that particular boot option to be accessed only after the user has supplied the proper password.
- remember to save and apply your settings after you have changed them
2)The second way you could modify lilo is by editing the configuration file lilo.conf.
- lilo.conf resides in the /etc directory
- you'll need to open it with a text editor with root privileges, so you can either login as root - which I would suggest against - or login as a regular user and acces it with root privileges. For example to do this with KDE press <alt><F2> (thats alt and F2 at the same time) and at the prompt that comes up type in
kdesu konqueror , this will open up a new konqueror window which will have root privileges so you can modify the file if you open it from there.
- in this file you will see several entries - one for each boot option - you'll want to find the one that refers to your windows boot option
mine looks like:
other=/dev/hda1
label="windows"
table=/dev/hda
- you can change whatever it says within the quotation marks to change the display name of the boot option
- to add a password to access the boot option edit the file read as so:
other=/dev/hda1
label="windows"
table=/dev/hda
password=testpass
- where
testpass is your password
- MOST IMPORTANTLY after making these changes to this file and saving them bring up a command prompt, type in
su then give it your root password when prompted, then type in the command
lilo - this updates lilo's boot configuration for the next boot.
Good luck and remember to post back so others can see what worked for you.
