Lilo trouble.........

free2hack · 07-05-2008, 02:44 PM

Hi, Im having some trouble configuring lilo. See slack detects my hard drive as hda, and zenwalk detects my hard drive as sda, when I try to boot to zenwalk from hda2, which is its partition, it wont boot. I tried changing the root to root=/dev/sda2, but that doesnt work either. It works with grub as slack with hda and zen with sda, but I cant seem to get it to work and lilo. Im trying to learn lilo and use it instead of grub, mainly because its default in Slackware. So any suggestions guys?

Alien Bob · 07-05-2008, 03:03 PM

IF Slackware detects your drive as 'hda' then chances are that you will notice that your Slackware seems to be awfully slow when it needs a lot of disk access.
Try booting the Slackware install CD and at the boot prompt, type

Code:

hugesmp.s hda=noprobe

When you are finally at the root prompt, check using

Code:

fdisk -l

whether your disk is now detected as 'sda' just like in Zenwalk.
If that is so, you will need the "hda=noprobe" option as a parameter in your /etc/lilo.conf so that the installed Slackware will detect the hard drive the same way.
Fixing that will probably give you a few headaches, because not only do you have to edit /etc/lilo.conf and /etc/fstab, you will also have to run the "lilo" command to write the changes to the bootsector of your disk, and lilo will refuse to do so unless you use the Slackware CD to boot from.

First, tell us if "hda=noprobe" made a change, and if you cannot figure out how to add that to your installation and fix lilo, report back in this thread and we'll take it from there.

Eric

free2hack · 07-05-2008, 03:19 PM

Hey thanx for your reply. I just tried booting with that option, and cfdisk said I have no hard drive, and fdisk -l returned nothing as well. I tried adding a target from the setup, and it just flashed and went back to the main setup menu. I set up a vm earlier, and installed slack, it came up as hda again, then I ran Zenwalk, GoblinX, Ubuntu, Arch Linux, and Sabayon live cd's, and each one returned sda partitions in the vm. Now this whole thing is taking place on my laptop, and I have not noticed any performance loss using slack with the hd detected as hda. I use devede regularly, vendetta online, heck all sorts of stuff. Im using slack 12.1, and I used 12 before, both detected as hda, and absolutely no noticeable performance issues. So Im stumped. Since it appears to be working fine, is there no way to append lilo.conf to run to sda and hda, I know grub can do it.

davimint · 07-06-2008, 12:51 AM

free2hack:
Still learning myself but I think the problem may be that your trying to boot a 2.6.25 kernel which will detect your ide drive as "sda" and not "hda". To fix this problem in my case of Fedora-9 which I installed yesterday so I would have a gnome desktop (then I found out that I liked Slackware-GSB better) was to setup lilo like this.

Code:

 image = /mnt/hda5/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.25.9-76.fc9.i686
  initrd = /mnt/hda5/boot/initrd-2.6.25.9-76.fc9.i686.img
  root = "UUID=39292ca5-6d20-43c0-add0-e4825c252729"
  label = Fedora-9
  read-only

If you notice the big difference is that I set up "UUID"

To find out what your UUID's are use this.

Code:

ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/

Maybe this will help.

free2hack · 07-06-2008, 10:21 AM

That changes things, when I go by UUID for root and change the image path as suggested, the penguin during boot is replaced with the zenwalk logo, which is what it is supposed to have. But I get a kernel panic, unable to sync, and a unable to open root. So Im not sure, do I need to edit my fstab to mount the zenwalk partition by uuid?

davimint · 07-07-2008, 07:24 PM

freehack:
Sorry, for the delay but my cable modem died in the weather yesterday while I was out of town. So today I had to go get another one and back on line tonight. Anyway, I'll try to help out if I can. Could you please post your lilo.conf or at least the part that were talking about. Also, you may want to take a look at this from "Zenwalk" it is a good guide for lilo to make sure you had a mount point set up and be sure it's mounted when you ran the "lilo" command so you don't get any errors.

http://wiki.zenwalk.org/index.php?ti...boot_with_LILO

If nothing else works, let me know what version of Zenwalk your working on and I'll set it up and try my luck to see if anything weird is going on, but other than the sda stuff I've had this on mybox before.

david

urka58 · 07-08-2008, 05:27 PM

You should give us some additional details about your lilo.conf...
So, boot Slackware, mount the partition where you have your Zenwalk kernel and initrd.img (if exists) to a suitable directory (ie /zen)
Let's say your lilo.conf is something like

Code:

image = /boot/vmlinuz
  root = /dev/hda1
  label = Slack12
  read-only
image = /zen/boot/vmlinuz-zenwalk
  initrd = /zen/boot/initrd-zenwalk.img
  root = /dev/sda2
  label = Zenwalk
  read-only

change it to:

Code:

image = /boot/vmlinuz
  root = /dev/hda1
  label = Slack12
  read-only
image = /zen/boot/vmlinuz-zenwalk
  initrd = /zen/boot/initrd-zenwalk.img
  label = Zenwalk
  append = "root=/dev/sda2 ro"
  read-only

then

Code:

lilo -v -t

if everything is fine

Code:

lilo -v

You should be done

Ciao