Special Lilo entries

TomalakBORG · 05-07-2006, 07:05 PM

I really like having the option to boot from a floppy in lilo, so that I can stop my BIOS from querying the floppy drive at boot, but I can still boot from a floppy without having to re-enable that. Can I do the same thing to boot from a cd-rom drive? It's rare that I will need to boot from something other than the hard drive on the machine I use lilo... so I would like to save the time at startup checking those drives.

My floppy entry:

Code:

other = /dev/fd0
     label = Floppy
     master-boot

I notice that when I run 'lilo' (the command, to save settings), I have to have a disk in the drive, or it won't run. When I changed /dev/fd0 to /dev/hdc, it needed media and wouldn't ever run. Any ideas?

-Bill

ioerror · 05-08-2006, 12:46 PM

You can't do this with lilo, because it hard codes the blocks that it needs to load. Thus, you can only use disks/discs that are present when you run /sbin/lilo.

You should be able to do it with grub, which is much more powerful.

But it sounds like Smart Boot Manager might be what you're looking for. The download section has both source and binary versions. However, I see that you have Slackware, so you can find a floppy image on CD1 (isolinux/sbootmgr/sbootmgr.dsk). Suse will probably have it too, somewhere.