Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (1784 mails)

[medmanks@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Gary)]

Date: Sat, 16 Dec 2000 11:06:36 -0600
From: Gary <medmanks@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Message-ID: <20001216110636.A3879@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [SLE] Booting with Floppy ~ including the SuSE Original Distro Boot Disk



On Sat, Dec 16, 2000 at 06:57:17AM +0000 or thereabouts, tabanna wrote:
> On Fri, 15 Dec 2000, Gary wrote:
> >  If it is Mandrake 7 or , the trouble might be that
> > Mandrake defaults to the Grub installer and not LILO, and not limited by
> > the 1024 problem.   It will install Grub automatically.  Just a thought.

>  Gee, thanks Gary  :)

> .. . . feels like Sherlock_Holmes stuff . . . what do you think I should
> look_for, and delete, in my Boot Partition /dev/hda1 ?

Hello my friend,

Yes, it does feel like Sherlock, and many times for Linux, for me, it feels
this way, probably why I like it so. 

In looking further at this thread, and now you feel that LILO is overriding
bios, then I think it is a LILO (at least in part) problem, and as
mentioned, with Mandrake perhaps defaulting to Grub. Mandrake has both LILO
and Grub, and defaults to Grub.  Each version of Linux that you have makes
its own LILO which is predicated and appended based on the previous version
of LILO.  I feel that Mandrake saw the other combined versions of LILO
(based on the 2 previous versions, added that combined LILO, and put it
into Grub.  I could be wrong.  Now comes along SuSE 7 after that, doing its
LILO thing, but not knowing what Grub is.  SuSE 7 was installed after
Mandrake.  I don't know what affect this would have, and it may totally
screw up everything, but what I would do is if you can get into Mandrake,
do a /sbin/lilo to reset Mandrake to LILO instead of Grub, then go into
your last install, SuSE 7, and rerun LILO with /sbin/lilo after that, to
append all the previous LILO to your latest install.  Just thinking about
it, you may have to start at the beginning from your oldest install to the
latest, but probably not, as Mandrake's Grub will have picked up the LiLOs
from the 2 previous installs by then.  LILO will append what it finds to the
current version, and I think this is where the problem lay, because LILO
could not have been used by Mandrake at all, and threw things out of whack. 

Again, it is purely speculation, and the last thing I would want to do is
trash your box.  But I think it will be okay, especially if you back up
your /etc/lilo.conf files for each distro  for safety, so that you can put
them back as they were in case of problems.

Also, Juergen may be on to something here too, by recreating your boot
floppy.  He mentions "Toms Linux" and I thought you mentioned "Toms Boot
Floppy" but I am not familiar with this.  Is it an actual pocket Linux or
some type of boot loader?   Juergen's thinking of an append option missing,
may be correct. 

These are the only things I can think of.

<p>
-- 
Best regards,
Gary             

Today's thought: Chaos, panic, pandemonium - my work here is done.