Hi all!

I am now downloading 12.2 dvd. Cant wait to try it out!

On the pc I want to try it I have an mbr that I do not want to change, have grub setup and are having 4 os's on the same machine.

Can I skip installing the bootloader in the installation?

How do I then change the grub to boot my slackware instead?

I now have archlinux on sda5. This is where the whole / is, incl. /boot.
From archlinux installation that made the grub install.
I will install slackware over my archlinux. So it will be on sda5. The mbr is ofcourse on sda. Any easy steps on setting up menu.1st to boot my slackware install?


Fredrik.

You can, but you'll find life much easier if you install lilo to the root partition of your new slack partition, and simply chainload it like you do for Windoze.

Where is the active /boot ? - it'd better not be on that Arch system.

EDIT: Quite tired, I am, it's late here I have fixed some errors and typos here and there, to my best knowledge the post should be correct now.

If you have no other place for your /boot folder you could just install Slackware, skip the LILO install, then switch to a second console (before rebooting!).

You will have to make a folder /boot/grub (actually /mnt/boot/grub, since during installation your new system is in /mnt), install grub package (installpkg -root /mnt /var/log/mount/extra/grub/grub*tgz), copy the files from /usr/lib/grub/i386-pc/ to /boot/grub (at that moment still /mnt/boot/grub) and create a file (/mnt)/boot/grub/menu.lst (with a minor "L", not a "One"). My menu.lst slightly modified:

Of course you have to adjust the (hd...) part and the resume part, if you don't delete the latter. Keep in mind that GRUB starts counting from 0 up, so sda1 is (hd0,0) if you have no IDE drive running but only this SATA/SCSI harddisk.

If you experience any problem with that setup you should boot from CD again into your Slackware installation (see the line at the boot prompt and substitute according to your Slackware partition). In this case something like

should reinstall GRUB to your harddisk, again assuming you have *NO* IDE disk running and that you modify according to your actual Slackware partition.


ADDENDUM: If you really want to use GRUB instead of LILO your life will become easier if you have an extra partition just to hold the grub files, kernels and initrd.gz if needed.

Yes. I have been using grub for years and never install lilo to my production box.

Edit /boot/grub/menu.lst. There is no automagic method. Well, there is a kgrubedit, but the package is not included with Slackware

If you maintain your original operating system, then grub will find the menu.lst and bootloader stage files in the same location. If not, then do not reboot from the installation CD without first installing grub from the extra branch.

But don't panic. If you reboot you can still boot the box with the installation CD and install grub.

After installing grub and editing menu.lst, be sure to run grub-install /dev/hda.

I prefer to maintain a separate boot partition so I never lose my grub menu.lst and bootloader files --- or my kernel files.

Thanks. Will see how I choose to do this.

I have XP, Vista, OS X and Linux on the same machine. And after I reinstalled the archlinux the last time, I spent hours trying to get all the os's to boot again.

But if I install lilo, I just need to change the configuration afterwards?
It does not messup the vista bootloader and so on?

I came across an issue with my new Slackware install and grub which is worth being aware of.

I have been running Slackware 12.0 on sdb1. Grub was installed with menu.lst in /boot/grub of sdb1.

I made a fresh install of slackware 12.2 to sdb3, ignored lilo, and thought that I would get it booting by editing menu.1st on sdb1 which is my usual practice.

This gave me a file error on booting to slack 12.2. The problem seems to be that there is an incompatibility between the grub version packaged with 12.0 and with higher versions of slackware. Something to do with inode size.

What I did to rectify things was install the grub package from slackware12.2/extras into my 12.0 installation and then ran grub-install sdb from there.

slackware 12.2 then booted fine.

Apparently Slackware changed to an inode size of 256 bytes for ext2 and ext3 filesystems which breaks some versions of grub. This used to be 128 bytes and still is in a lot of other distros.

http://rkrishna.tp.googlepages.com/slackerbasics#reeb

this is an old page but you can easily install grub before the first reboot, dont install lilo but exit the setup,.. mount the partition as mentioned in the link above... install grub from extra.....run grubinstall... use one of the menu.lst file.

Thanks for all answers.

I just decided to install with lilo the normal way. Used expert configuration and setup for slackware, winxp, winvista and osx as an win entry. Just osx that did not boot. So I will now try to look for an solution to get osx booting as well..

EDIT: Osx is on hda3 and I have setup that in lilo.conf, but when I choose it it boots winvista, hda2...

Now it is working. This is what I did.

Installed slacware 12.2 from dvd.
Installed lilo with installer.
Booted into slackware, installed grub from /extra on dvd.
Setup grub with grubconfig, manually configured the os x entry as an win entry.

Now its working.


Also, with grub, I do not have the irritating thing where lilo is making booting slackware....> .... Right after it is pressed.
This part took 40sec before it started booting, with grub it starts right away!

This is great!

You could also have done without the install of lilo during the set up. Once completed with installing you can 'chroot /mnt' and install grub that way... However, you also have to have the file visible from that chroot environment. so it would really be

then set up grub however.

I use both and have been for years ilike the fact that in grub.
The backup copy of the MBR for drive '/dev/hda' is
# here '/boot/grub/mbr.hda.4016'. You can restore it like this.
# dd if=mbr.hda.4016 of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1
4016 is generated by grub.
Lilo is wonderful I use it to. and if you keep your system simple both can save you if the MBR is corrupted. I see some of the new selinux stuff now days I have to get a note book out just to right down the boot id for a mbr failure. but all else fales if you put a grub in the boot any grub program will read the menu.1st.
Lillo works it's good and why not have both grub saves me and lilo does too.