Re: [PLUG] SuSe 7.3 booting

[Bill Jonas <bill@billjonas.com>]

On Sun, Mar 17, 2002 at 11:24:14PM -0500, Doug Crompton wrote:
> Here is what I did...

There's a simpler way, although (as always) it isn't as flexible.  It's
handy in a pinch, or if you have a very large kernel and only need to
worry about booting one partition.

First, dd (or cat, or whatever) the kernel to a floppy.
Next, use "rdev /dev/fd0 /dev/rootpartition".
Now you're ready to boot.

The Slackware installation/configuration utility refers to these as a
"simple boot disk" or a "LILO boot disk", incidentally.

Thanks, though, for sharing the information.

> NOW.. how can I eliminate the floppy and boot directly from the drive!!??

Well, from the software side, not much can be done with LILO.  It relies
on the information that the BIOS provides it.  So if you can get the
BIOS to recognize the other controller and the disks on it, you should
be in business, assuming you stick with LILO.  GRUB might be able to
work around some of these limitations, but I'm not sure; you'd have to
read up on it a bit.  (I plan on migrating to GRUB soon, after having
had my first experience with it.  I use a GRUB boot disk to boot into
the HURD the other day, LILO being insufficient for the task.  It was
neat.)

Another possibility is to re-partition hda and make a small /boot
partition on it.  Assuming a recent LILO (or if you use GRUB, which, to
my knowledge, never had the problem), you shouldn't have a problem with
cylinder boundaries, so you could use FIPS to split a few megs off the
end of your Win9x partition and make it /boot.  You could always back up
your Windows data and repartition so that you have /boot at the
beginning of the drive.  GNU parted might be able to help if you don't
want to go that route.  (For a while, I had Windows 98 booting from hda2
with no problems.)

If you have the space to spare and a small extra drive, you could make
that hda, and move your current Windows drive to hdb.  I'm not sure how
Windows would react to that change, though.

Oh well, just some thoughts off the top of my head.

-- 
Bill Jonas    *    bill@billjonas.com    *    http://www.billjonas.com/

Developer/SysAdmin for hire!   See http://www.billjonas.com/resume.html

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