[KLUG Members] Re: Can't boot into RH 7.3

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Sun, 2002-05-12 at 03:53, Steven L Owens wrote:
> I installed redhat 7.3 on a second hard disk I had.  The first
> harddisk has winXP on it.
> I didn't want to mess around with the MBR so I decided I would
> just boot from floppy when I wanted to use linux.  So I had lilo
> install on the first sector of the second disk and created
> the boot floppy.

Did you have LILO install in the MBR of the second hard disk, or the
beginning of the root partition on the second hard disk.

The former is _useless_.  The latter works, assuming you have a way to
pass the partition to the boot loader.

> When I try to boot from the floppy it can't find boot image "linux".
> So now I have no access to my redhat install.
> Below are my bootdisk contents, my lilo.conf, and partitions.
>
> Here are the files on the boot floppy:
> boot 0KB

What are the contents of that file?

> initrd.img 0KB
> LDLINUX 7KB

Or is it that one?

> syslinux 0KB
> vmlinuz 113KB
> 
> Here is my lilo.conf:
> prompt=50
> default=linux
> boot=/dev/hdb1
> map=/boot/map
> install=/boot/boot.b
> message=/boot/message
> linear
> image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.18-3
> label=linux
> initrd=/boot/initrd-2.4.18-3.img
> read-only
> root=/dev/hdb5
> append="hdc=ide-scsi"
> I created separate partitions for each of the following:
> /boot
> /
> /home
> /usr
> /tmp
> /var
> /LFS

I'd consider installing LILO in the MBR.  It will NOT affect Windows
XP.  I know.  I am running an XP / RedHat dual-boot -- on a single drive
(actually, a single 160GB RAID-0 volume), no less.

-- Bryan

-- 
The US government could be 100x more effective, and 1/100th the
Constitutional worry, if it dictated its policy to Microsoft as
THE MAJOR CUSTOMER it is, and not THE REGULATOR it fails to be.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Bryan J. Smith, SmithConcepts, Inc.   mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org
Engineers and IT Professionals     http://www.SmithConcepts.com