Hello,

I am having trouble installing Lilo for 2 different distributions.

Basically my system is as follows:

/dev/sda is my MBR
/dev/sda1 is for Windows
/dev/sda5 is for Debian root
/dev/sda6 is for Mandriva root
/dev/sda7 is swap for both linuxes
/dev/sda8 is home for both linuxes

When I try to install grub I get this error message:

[root@Lapa felipe]# lilo
Added Mandriva_Linux *
Added Mandriva-nonfb
Added windows
Added failsafe
Fatal: open /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.17-2-686: No such file or directory

Of course it can't find the image ... it's on another partition. How can I make this work?

Here is my lilo.conf file:

# File generated by DrakX/drakboot
# WARNING: do not forget to run lilo after modifying this file

I'm no expert at this, so be careful, but when I was mixing Mandriva (lilo default bootloader) and debian (grub default), grub constantly screwed stuff up, and I had no problems with lilo. Everyone says grub is much better, but I never had anything but problems with it, and any problems I had with lilo I could correct myself without any trouble. So I installed lilo to the MBR, and chain loaded grub, which was installed on /dev/sda5, then just modified lilo.conf to look like this, in your case. There are probably more elegant ways to do it, or a more correct way, but this worked for me, and was trouble free, even when I constantly reinstalled different flavors of linux on different partitions. I just put grub or whatever the default bootloader was on it's own root partition, then updated lilo via my mandriva install, so I could always at least access my main(at the time) distro.

Try this lilo.conf out.....

default="Mandriva_Linux"
boot=/dev/sda
install=menu
prompt
nowarn
timeout=100
message=/boot/message
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label="Mandriva_Linux"
root=/dev/sda6
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append="resume=/dev/sda7"
vga=788
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label="Mandriva-nonfb"
root=/dev/sda6
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append="resume=/dev/sda7"
other=/dev/sda1
label="windows"
other=/dev/sda5
label="debian"
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label="failsafe"
root=/dev/sda6
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append="failsafe splash=silent resume=/dev/sda7"

You have to remember to install grub on debians root partition I think. You only need to put debian itself in grubs menu, as it'll only be used to boot debian.

Best of luck....if you use the lilo.conf I put in let me know how it worked. Best thing about lilo and mandriva, I could use mandriva's install cd under the rescue cheat code and it would fix lilo for me. It's a life saver. Another thing I hated about grub was once I had installed it to the mbr, installing lilo over it didn't alway work the way it should. And on a failed install, grub, in a screwed up state was there, but on a distro that used lilo, even with a failed install, I could still get lilo working, to get at least one of the linux's installed on that box working. Anyway, enough of a rant.... Good luck....

David