I am installing 14.2 from a usb drive to my sdb disk. I have not been able to get the computer to boot directly to the Linux disk. This is what comes up at boot:
Reboot and Select proper Boot device
or Insert Boot device and press a key

I have checked the BIOS and set the boot disk to the sdb disk many times.

I can boot into Linux if I use the usb drive and enter:
Boot: huge.s root=sdb1 rdinit=ro

I included a screen image of my cfdisk for the disk.
I think I have something not right in my lilo.conf but after much reading in the help I am still lost. I tried both installing lilo to the MBR and root as well as the liloconfig recycle command.
Any suggestions are appreciated.
Happy Trails

When adding the lilo.conf file I noticed I did not put this in the install forum. Apologies, it was a long day.

Attached Files

lilo.conf.txt (1.8 KB, 18 views)

Your issue is that you have your boot device as /dev/sdb1. This means lilo is only installed to the partition header rather than the MBR, and means you'd need another bootloader to load it.

You should be able to simply change boot = /dev/sdb1 to:

and then run lilo to save it to the MBR. After that, it should boot fine.

To go into a bit more detail, the boot parameter is where it will install the bootloader to and the root parameter is where the OS resides. Since the BIOS doesn't understand partitions (just the overall disks that contain the partitions), if you put the bootloader in a partition header (specifying the partition of the /dev/sdb device), then the BIOS doesn't even know it's there. In that case, you'd need another bootloader installed into the MBR to be able to point to the bootloader installed in the partition header (this is called chainloading, since you're using one bootloader to boot another bootloader).

In your case, you don't need two bootloaders, and you don't have two installed... so we need to change lilo to install itself into the MBR rather than the partition header. Changing the boot parameter of lilo will do just that. Hope this made sense... feel free to ask another other questions if I managed to muddy it up.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thank you Bassmadrigal, that was it and thanks more for the details. I have read them several times to get it to sink in.
I successfully booted the disk. I am only doing this for enlightenment on the details of booting both Linux and Windows. Reading about this is good but doing it brings out the truly important details.
Happy Trails