hi,
i am trying to boot using my hd, rather than a floppy, but when i update lilo it says "Partition 2 /dev/hda is not marked active"

how do i activate it?

/dev/hda1 swap
/dev/hda2 linux

ty

i assume that's a bootable flag, not that linux officially has any interest in them. just use fdisk or cfdisk to add the flag to that partition.

I'm not a lilo guru, take a look at shilo's post called "this is how I do it all"

I assume? not sure you didnt say that you just installed? yes?

there are two section there for you to read, his points on his "fstab" and the "lilo" section.

You can boot up off the floppy disk emergency if you created one.

Also check in your bios that the boot sector is not write-protected that messes me up on mine. There are security implications but that's the only way I can get linux to work for me at all.

I'm not sure but this should at least get you to the point where you can look at Shilo's and make a judegment OKAY this is mine and may not work for you. I'm just giving it as an example.

it sounds? like you need to go in to console as root:

and in there verify that you have

and

This assume that "/boot" directory has the nessary System.map, .config an vmlinuz symlinks.

lol ok, well adding a boot flag, as you said, didnt do squat. apart from not throwing any errors when you run lilo!

just to clarify, 3 weeks ago i changed over hardware (full PCs worth), and have just been booting from a floppy. i dual boot with winXP, it being a sata disk, while linux is on a regular IDE disk.

/dev/hda1 swap
/dev/hda2 linux
/dev/sdb1 WinXP

so now i want to add the lilo booter to the disk. i reran the liloconfig script and added it the "root disk" then i changed the boot sequnence so the IDE boots first.

but when i have the IDE drive as #1, it craps out before the lilo screen and i have to do a hard reboot.

I can't help you sorry. I don't have SATA so I have no experience with it. Hopefully someone will for you shortly.