Well, Cedrik, I simply stated in plain American English that as long as there was a choice it does not matter what mine or your opinion is. If you like Grub, use it! I can find more people that don't like it than people that do. Furthermore, there is no reason to say things like "It is obvious that you talk about one thing that you don't know at all." simply because you feel threatened because someone does not agree with your enlightened opinion.

I do apologize for what this thread has become aus9. You asked for help and did not receive it. However, I do not use Grub as a bootloader but I did find a sites that talks about INITRD images. I don't know if they will help but here they are:

http://msittig.freeshell.org/linux/grub.html
http://www.jeepster.org.uk/bits/grub.html

Hey subekk0, my bad to misunderstand what you said about config for dummies.
Peace

aus9 > info grub
That may help you to get starting

anyway, grub has some possibillities i didn't know, so i'll do some
reading on that.... :-)

egag

I know... It must works fine for many of us...

But everytime I tried installing a Distro that has grub as the official bootloader (getting the installation do the DEFAULT MBR install), I screwed my WinXP bootloader... And couldn't correct it by applying the M$ rescue command for the MBR...

LILO NEVER got me in that kind of trouble... In fact, I didn't bug me once!

Now i'm just stuck with an Slack 10 installation and trying to get Mandrake 10 works from the Slack lilo.conf...

I've tried so many hint around the net... Nothing could help me... I'm always getting the famous "...gettext: Permission denied" and many other lines like this... Until the mandrake boot stops...

I tried copying the vmlinuz and initrd.img of MDK to Slack's /boot (renaming them... of course!)... and also using the /mnt/mdk mounting for refering in the lilo.conf... Always with same result...

Anyway... that's not part of this subject!

Regards,

subekk0

Please don't revert back to the topic of the thread, I am not used to it
(joke I think)

Rant starts
I know how to use grub, I have grub working off 3 floppies to boot large kernels and surprise me if LILO can do this please.

My question is about grubconf, which could be a wonderful tool for (us) newbies if the PAUSE command would work.

I sometimes call myself a newbie because in many ways I am.

Cedrik ....MY mummy warned me not to use dummying it down as it may inflame. But now I am equally guilty of responding so will have to hit myself with the LILO manual for a loooong time. My subtle hint on keeping to the thread's theme was lost on Cedrik.

I am equally guilty of not reading the starter poster's questions.

Consider this a gentle reminder.

NO I do not hate LILO. Let people who choice LILO create their own threads.

end of rant

Wow. This is a nice thread LOL

LILO and GRUB both work if configured properly.

LILO will immediately tell you if there's an error after you run it, while for GRUB it will tell you during boot time, but as we all know you can edit it.

Personally I switched to GRUB because there was this one time when I accidentally rebooted when my LILO was still broken. What was inconvenient for me was trying to find where in the world did I place my slackCD2. At least the need to find something in my room during boot time was eliminated by GRUB.

As for the original question for this thread. Just try editing menu.lst manually to add your initrd. or make a copy or your initrd image to the hard drive and just point to it during boot time.

Will try out this grub package from extras, as for me I do hope that people are given the choice to install LILO or GRUB during install. Because let's face it, there are a lot of slack users who swear by LILO, but I'm sure there's a portion out there would love to try out GRUB.

Hmmm, I wanna try Grub now, but I just don't see the point - I'm not doing anything technical with my machine I'm booting Slackware...whoa!

I guess the traditional usage of LILO in Slack dates back to when hard drives were tiny and people tended to only have one OS, now-a-days, those of you who have money, (not me!) run multiple OS/s with several distros and maybe BSD for kicks, if I was doing that, I think I'd go for Grub, it really is quite well suited to that environment.

However, LILO is suited to booting one distro and multiple kernels on that distro, it is incredibly easy to set up and works when everything goes wrong. Of course, with Grub's recovery console - who knows?

As I and many others have already said, it would be fantastic to see Slack users given a choice during the installation - I probably will stick to Lilo, but I'm sure plenty of others will go for Grub - if of course I was to try something like LFS, I'd be forced to go over to Grub (since I can't be bothered faffing around with LILO which, from their FAQ, is fairly unsupported)

As for the threads topic - from the title it seemed a very general discussion, I guess from the first post it was actually a set of questions about grub - sorry for destroying your thread!

Right, now back to breakfast :P

Steve

For the PAUSE question...

Did you try something like this in menu.lst :
pause Insert 2nd floppy, and press <enter>

Cedrik

thanks for dropping by.

heres my tutorial showing your suggestion on the pause already working on a 1440 Kb THREE floppy system to boot large kernels with initrd images.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=198155

If that tut is too long do a find for "large kernel"

I need your assistance with 1680 Kb floppies when it is convenient for you to have a look at this link. I repeat that while my system is live grub reports success in embedding but on reboot it no go.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=223930

Any thoughts even critical thoughts I what I have missed will not be rebuked, now that we are on speaking terms.

Don't feel bad about a robust debate..

This is just my opinion and Pat may do the exact opposite. I doubt we will see a choice given during the install to use lilo or grub. It seems like Pat tries to keep things as simple as possible. That would just add an extra couple of steps he would have to script into the install process. Let's face it, that install process hasn't changed much over the years. I think he goes by the "if it ain't brok, don't fix it" adage. He also seems to feel that Slack users are good enough to install other apps if they want to use them. As I said, just my opinion.

aus 9

did you indicate to GRUB what is root partition before the line :
device (fd0) /dev/fd0u1680

also from grub help, it say that device command can be used only in the grub shell (?)

At least could you just post the menu.lst from floppy 1 ?

Semi off topic.

Tried the grub packages from current.

grubconfig isn't so good but it works, leaves room for improvement. By default it installs the stages in /boot/grub even though I have /boot partition so it looked something like this /boot/boot/grub > ugly. But running grub-install after restored the default directory to /boot/grub so I erased the redundant folder.

IMHO, one is better off editing menu.lst manually.

Cedrik

yep see the second link paras 7 and 8.

Altho it may not be fully clear, I mention in the PS that I also tried a device.map file that had
contents
# /mnt/floppy/device.map

(fd0) /dev/fd0u1680

The problem as I now see it, is a boot floppy does not yet have a unix file structure, so dev 1680 will mean nothing?

Maybe the initrd ram image could be tricked to support unusual floppy drivers?

I thinks toms root and boot disk is a 1720 Kb floppy and so maybe thats where the answer lies?

any clues feel free to post to that link or this thread.

I noticed you did not use setup (fd0) to set grub on floppy 1, just after the 6), is it not needed, sure ?

After the 6), I would try :

grub
grub> root (fd0)
grub> setup (fd0)
grub> quit