Problem mutli-OS booting with Lilo
I'll got ahead and go right to the point. I have 2 HDs, hda and hdb. HDA has 3 partitions: hda1 (knoppix), hda2 (swap), hda3 (free). On HDB there's hdb1 (DSL) and hdb2 (FreeDOS). For a while I was using HDB as the main HD on the computer, and I was using Lilo to dual boot DSL and FreeDOS. NOW, I installed a new HD (current HDA) with Knoppix on it, and am using HDB as a slave.
I configured lilo.conf and ran "lilo" and got the follow error message:
Quote:
Fatal: First sector of /dev/hdb1 doesn't have a valid boot signature
So I went ahead and took DSL from lilo.conf and just ran it with FreeDOS. Lilo ran configuration just fine and said it added FreeDOS. So now I loading FreeDOS and got another error:
What's going on? I had Lilo installed on HDB, so i reinstalled DSL on HDB1 and this time chose not run mkliloboot. Still didn't work. So what am I doing wrong?
Re: Problem mutli-OS booting with Lilo
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bidi
What's going on? ...
I'm far from a lilo expert and can't directly answer your problem with it. But my understanding is that grub might be a better choice han lilo for this. And much much better would be to use a boot manager like XOSL or Smart Boot Manager. These programs are ideal for mutil-boot systems and will let you manage a large number of different installed OS's.
XOSL is a bit larger. It has a nicer graphical menu structure. It's overall more powerful. It includes Ranish Partition manager built right. It's a bit more complex to set up but easy enough if you can follow instructions and you have a floppy drive on the system (for saving some backup stuff).
Smart Boot Manager is smaller and simpler. Text based menu (like old style DOS menus), no partition manager, less feature rich. It's somewhat easier to set up, not quite as easy to use.
I like XOSL and have it on several of my systems but have used Smart Boot Manager after seeing it mentioned here and have installed it on one of my test machines.
With either of these programs you would install them as what the BIOS runs when booting. You would install LILO on the partition of the Linux that you are installing. You might still have to reinstall lilo and edit a configuration file when you change hda into hdb, but normally you will not have to edit or reinstall lilo every time you change or add an OS (although I think you would have to do this if you upgrade a kernel). Again, see grub for something to replace lilo with that is a bit smarter and can do more of this for you. See the above programs for a full feature multi-boot solution.
Re: Problem mutli-OS booting with Lilo
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bidi
I configured lilo.conf and ran "lilo" and got the follow error message:
Quote:
Fatal: First sector of /dev/hdb1 doesn't have a valid boot signature
Please post your lilo.conf.