Stopping an echo of an old hard disk
 

Although I have SuSE 8.2 and 9.3, from preference I still use 7.2 for the work I do with nedit, xfig, and gcc. But recently I have had to replace my hard disk so I prepared partitions on a new disk for 7.2 and 8.2 and copied them over using dd. On the old hd, 7.2 had been booted by LILO and when I added 8.2 everything booted with GRUB.

So I installed 9.3 on the new hd that already had 7.2 and 8.2, and GRUB found them all. Unfortunately, 7.2 had to be moved from hda6 to hda2, and 8.2 went from hda8 to hda5. I changed the entries in each /etc/fstab to suit just by mounting them from 9.3. Now I could boot 8.2 from GRUB, I was pleased. But I still had to use the installation CD to boot 7.2. I didn't want to load 7.2's LILO into the mbr since that would upset GRUB as installed by 9.3. So I tried to put LILO onto a boot disk but haven't been able to stop it from believing that 7.2 was still on hda6 even though I had changed 7.2's lilo.conf to suit the new partition. Something in the process of making the LILO floppy changes lilo.conf back to /dev/hda6 for the root address although the initial line remains 'boot = /dev/hda2/boot' as changed.

Can anyone tell me where and what to change in 7.2 so that it will accept it is on hda2, instead of hda6, and allow me to boot with a LILO floppy?

Or any alternative solution so I can use any of the three SuSE versions when required?

First, check your grub.conf to ensure it points to the correct partition for each OS you wish to be able to boot from.

It is also importat to update the FSTAB for each OS to ensure it finds everything it needs. After partitions are mounted, the mount points are used for reference, so you should not need to make any changes beyond the two I mentioned.

Regards.

Yes, the GRUB menu.lst item for SuSE 7.2, as generated by SuSE 9.3, points to root (hd0,1) which, I understand, is equivalent to /dev/hda2 and, as noted above, I have changed /etc/fstab to point to the correct partitions. The problem arises only when the GRUB listing tries to boot SuSE 7.2 at the /dev/hda2 partition. LILO begins but stalls at LI because it can't find the correct location of the second stage. I have tried to regenerate the LILO in the boot directory of SuSE 7.2 and it does this but for some reason, that I am asking about, the lilo.log shows that it still thinks SuSE 7.2 is at /dev/hda6 (where it was on the old hd). Obviously, something more needs to be changed within SuSE 7.2 before LILO can be regenerated correctly. I am asking where that might be?