I'm trying to make a flash drive bootable. I fdisked it successfully but I can't get lilo to be happy with it. It never makes the map in the right place no matter what combination of commands I use. -m either reads the map of the current boot drive or tells me it can't write the map of the target drive.

I suspect I have made a simple mistake, but I've read the man page thoroughly and tried every combination of referring to not-the-current drive (-C, -r...) and failed.

What does liloconfig do? It's supposed to have a man page but it doesn't exist; none of the usual help switches do anything.

I would use grub. Is there some reason you have to use lilo?

Are you trying to boot some Linux OS directly from the flash drive without using the bootloader on the main hard drive? If that's the case, did you select the option to install Lilo to the MBR?
Which Linux are you using on the flash drive?
Is this a Legacy install rather than UEFI?

liloconfig is similar to grub-install with Grub. If you are editing /etc/lilo.conf, you need to run as root user: lilo OR /sbin/lilo or the changes will not be included. Take a look at the links below which give pretty detailed information on installing lilo and modifying it, at the first link you need to scroll down a bit to the section on Lilo:

https://docs.slackware.com/slackbook:booting

The link below explains a Lilo install as performed during an installation of Slackware. As pointed out on the page, you should be able to run it anytime after install by running liloconfig. You need to post the above requested details as you haven't given enough information for detailed instructions.

Also, if you are using or trying to use the usb with UEFI, none of this applies.

I like lilo.

Yes. Occasionally I can't boot my hard drive. I've used SystemRescueDisk until now. I want to make a custom drive.


? Or is it more complicated than that?
returns:/dev/sdb1 is mounted on /Backup

Slackware 14.2

Since I don't know what UEFI is it must be legacy.

Whoops! The flash drive is bad: it un-exists at boot, won't exist until I unplug it then plug it back in after boot. After that it works properly.