Q. re. dual-boot of 2 Linux OS's - esp. re. LILO

From: Scruffy Eagle (this_cant_at_be.spammed)
Date: 11/11/04 

Date: Thu, 11 Nov 2004 04:38:46 -0600

Hi!

I'm a relative newbie who's been RTFM for a couple of weeks now, a couple of
hours a day on those days which aren't all-nighters trying to get the thing
to work. I'm working w/ a HP 6360, 128 MB RAM, 10 GB HD, w/ an AMD K6 333
MHz CPU. I've got the HD partitioned as 300 MB swap as hda1, 3.5 GB ext2
Debian v2.4.18 kernel as hda2, 3.08 GB ext3 Knoppix HD installation (SID
testing/unstable) as hda3, and the remaining 3.08 GB is free space waiting
for the Corel Linux v1.2 to arrive for playing with. I've run into a minor
obstacle, for the moment. I installed Debian onto hda2 w/ LILO in menu mode.
It doesn't give options - just boots straight into Linux. I then installed
the Knoppix onto hda3. Its LILO defaulted to BMP mode, w/ 3 options.
Luckily, I did indeed make boot floppies for both systems during the setup
processes. So, the Debian installation is still accessible; it just takes
about 8 minutes, waiting for the boot floppy to do its stuff to boot hda2.
During both installations, I chose installing LILO into the MBR, since I
wasn't sure how to proceed if I didn't do it that way. I've tried tweaking
the hda3 Knoppix LILO to include an option for booting the hda2 Debian -
but, I must be missing something, because I can't get it to work yet.

All of the helpful material I've found & read so far - it's all focused on
dual-booting when one of the OS's is some version of Windows. NONE of it
seems to address the situation where the OS's involved are both Linux
variants. As I said, I'm being a good boy and R'ingTFM - but, I'm hoping
that someone out there can shave some of the time needed between now &
having both OS's available, by giving me advice, a guideline to script code
to try in lilo.conf (either one; hda2's or hda3's).

Thanks in advance, if you can help me with this!

Scruffy
http://scruffyeagle.com

Relevant Pages

  • Re: getting LILO to boot windows
    ... >> people with experience getting LILO or Grub to work may be able to help me. ... >> I need to get my windows installation working to flash my dvd drive. ... > Can you boot your Linux now, even after executing fdisk /mbr et ell? ... # Specifies the device that should be mounted as root. ...
    (comp.os.linux.misc)
  • Re: unchecked 31 times
    ... >> map which is created at installation and is sector based. ... So the boot loader can be tiny. ... and lilo can boot off a RAID device. ...
    (Debian-User)
  • SuSE 9.1: Problems booting GRUB or LILO
    ... hda3 - Linux swap ... At first I did a "default" installation accepting everything ... A third try with ext2 and LILO works OK for Linux ... (I get the LILO option screen can boot Linux) ...
    (alt.os.linux.suse)
  • Re: debian sucks aka i cant get it to install
    ... Can you boot with Knoppix? ... This is also a known error on some images, ... that to boot your new installation. ... If you prefer lilo, I do not know, how to do this. ...
    (Debian-User)
  • Re: Dual Boot Instructions
    ... No one has said either yes or no to the proposed installation as described ... just disconnect the already installed Vista drive, then plug in the blank HDD ... the first of the boot options if it detects WinXP already installed on the ... The System Partition must be a primary partition and marked Active ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.vista.hardware_devices)