I have an external USB hard drive which has Slackware 10.1 on it with a lilo boot loader. I primarily use it when I'm away from home as an external drive to my work laptop. My work lap top has W2000 on it. This arrangement works fine as when the external drive is connected I arrange the bios so that it's first boot device.

At home I have access to two desktops one has two internal drives with XP and the other has three internal drives with Slackware 10.1 on it. On these machines when I attach the USB drive to them and boot this drive as the first boot device all I get is "L" of the lilo boot prompt. I presume the reason for this is that Lilo first checks that the configuration stored in the MBR matches the configuaration of the desktop i.e. one external drive with Slackware on it and one internal drive with W2000 on it. I'm assuming that as the desktops don't have that configuration Lilo just gives up, is this a correct conclusion. How can I get the external drive to boot on these desktops or indeed any desktop?


Thanks in anticipation.

Probably means the drive ordering is different. Can't find the stage 2.

Because the usb-drive linux installation was installed for a different computer, you will also have a problem with the wrong devices being used. You may wish instead to boot up using the slackware installed for the desktop, but add a user whose home page (listed in /etc/passwd) is the usb drive. You may need to change the UID for the user on the USB drive so that it is unique.