Installing LILO

mcd · 08-24-2003, 04:56 PM

hi all,

i'm a newbie, and i'm having some trouble with LILO. i've got a dual boot, w/:

*****************************************
hda (1 partition) win98

hdb1 /boot (specified bootable in fdisk)
hdb5 /root
hdb6 /usr
*****************************************

i'm pretty sure i have lilo installed on hdb1, when i run lilo in a shell, i get the following....

******************************************
bash-2.05b# lilo
Warning: LBA32 addressing assumed
Warning: /dev/hdb1 is not on the first disk
Added DOS *
Added Linux
******************************************

but when i restart my computer i get all 999999's, so i have to boot off a floppy. i'm guessing that this is because i don't have lilo installed on the master boot record (which is the first sector of hda, right?).

so my question is: how can i install lilo to the MBR (and will this harm win98)?

thanks for any advice,

enigmasoldier · 08-24-2003, 05:14 PM

When lilo spits out anything other than LILO: at you, it is an error message. I found a brief list of lilo error codes and posted it for you.

I would suggest that you upgrade to grub. It is a superior boot loader anyways and has worked for me on hardware that pisses off lilo.

Links
http://www.ipcop.org/1.3.0/en/instal...LO-errors.html
http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/grub-download.html

Mathieu · 08-24-2003, 05:15 PM

You will need to edit /etc/lilo.conf
and set the boot variable to /dev/hda

Code:

boot=/dev/hda

Once you have finished editing the file, at the command line, type: lilo

mcd · 08-24-2003, 07:06 PM

thanks, it's installed to hda now and working fine. btw, is there any way to tell it to use that nice blue gui instead of the command promt?

Mathieu · 08-24-2003, 11:32 PM

Yes.
In your /boot directory, you should have a file called message.
This file can be a PCX image file or a text file.
If the file is present, you can add the following line to your lilo.conf

Code:

message=/boot/message