Booting off of slave HD?

TwistedKestrel · n00b Joined: 02 Feb 2003 Posts: 29

Alright, first of all, I beg forgiveness for my ignorance. I used to bother people on DALnet with these inane questions, but, well, it's pretty dead.

Alright. I have two hard drives in my computer, and I installed Gentoo onto the second one. I also installed LILO onto the second one, in order to preserve everything on the first one in case I did something stupid. My theory was that I hit the boot menu button on my computer and boot off of the second HD instead of the first one whenever I wanted to run Gentoo.

I cannot get this to work. Is it possible? Every single time, I get "L99 99 99 ..." The only possible explanation I have for this is that hda and hdb get reversed when I boot directly off of the second drive ... if that's true, there's pretty much no way to write a lilo.conf for that, is there

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ctford0 · Posted: Sat Mar 01, 2003 2:26 am Post subject:

That is exactly what happens....

When you tell your computers bios to boot to the slave drive basically that drive becomes the master as far as the os is concerned. I'm not sure how you would handle it in lilo, but with grub all you do is use root (hd0,0), just as if it were the master drive. Now this is where I get confused. Even though you tell the system to boot to this drive linux still labels it as hdb not hda. Hope this helps and good luck.

Chris

cbreaker · Posted: Sat Mar 01, 2003 8:30 am Post subject:

Getting LiLO to boot off of anything but a <2GB primary drive is troublesome to put it nicely.

Grub is very good at booting anything. I'm a believer in Grub. You shouldn't have a big problem getting grub to work after you get past the confusion of how grub sees the hard disks versus how they are seen in linux.

I would get L99 99 99 ... when I tried to boot Lilo off of a large hard disk. I also got it when I tried to boot it from a SCSI disk (selected from BIOS) when there was an IDE disk in the machine as well. I found no solutions, but I did find Grub and it worked.

Lilo is old and on every machine past my old PII-333 it's been a headache for me.

Yeric · Apprentice Joined: 17 Feb 2003 Posts: 150

If I wanted to preserve my first hd without overwriting the mbr on it, I would use a boot floppy, infact this is exactly what I do

and boot using Grub

if you have changed the way the hard disks boot in bios, then you will need to change your lilo file, as hdb is now hda and vice versa

hope this helps