[H-GEN] Boot from floppy

Craig Eldershaw ce at comlab.ox.ac.uk
Sun Aug 30 07:10:21 EDT 1998


>> I'm sure that I'm doing something extremely silly, and would appreciate a
>> pointer as to what I'm doing wrong.
>>
>
> For some strange reason I think the boot drive for linux must be ID1.
> I might be wrong!

Hmmm...pretty sure that neither LILO nor Linux are fussy about such
things as long as it can find it.  However if booting off the HDD's
boot sector, then the PC's BIOS might only allow booting off a
particular ID.  But if that was the case here, then we'd never get as
far as "LI...".

In any case, it wouldn't explain failing to boot from a boot floppy (as
Steve said failed).  Speaking of which, I forgot to ask: Steve, what
did happen when you attempted booting with the boot floppy ?  A
complaint about unable to mount root file system ?  Or the "LI..."
again ?

By boot floppy do you mean a disk with just a raw kernel (eg cat
/vmlinuz >/dev/fd0) or a formatted disk containing the kernel as a
file, and lilo in it's boot sector ?

If the former, then LILO is never started, the machine should jump
straight into the kernel booting (which might then fail when it tries
to mount a root file system it can't find - fix using "rootflags
/dev/fd0 /dev/sdb1").  If the later, then edit the /etc/lilo.conf to
boot=/dev/fd0; root=/dev/sdb1 and then re-run lilo.

Cheers,
	Craig.





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