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LILO on mixed big/small IDE drives

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Morgan Burke

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Jul 4, 1996, 3:00:00 AM7/4/96
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I'd like to put LILO on the master boot record of /dev/hda so I can
boot Linux without a floppy. However, /dev/hda contains no Linux
partitions (which are all on /dev/hdc). Furthermore, hda is a small
IDE drive, whereas hdc is big IDE.

The HOWTOs tell me I should include an "append=2484,16,63" and "linear"
line in /etc/lilo.conf to tell LILO about the big IDE drive, but I'm
afraid that it is going to apply this info to hda instead and trash my
primary drive. Is this a concern?

-- Morgan Burke
mor...@sitka.triumf.ca

Michael Ng

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Jul 4, 1996, 3:00:00 AM7/4/96
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When LILO is talking about hda, it is referring to the MasterBootRecord(MBR)
It doesn't matter your hda is big or small. The PC looks for the OS
loader at hda first.
hda1,2,3,4.. is the partiitons.
I have a 420M as hda, 1.2G as hdc (I have LBA controller)
My default is to a DOS6, and can be chosen to boot Linux(hdc7) or Windows
95(hdc1)
If you want to, I can mail you my lilo.conf
-----------

Morgan Burke (mor...@sitka.triumf.ca) wrote:
: I'd like to put LILO on the master boot record of /dev/hda so I can

: -- Morgan Burke
: mor...@sitka.triumf.ca

--
Michael (sy...@engr.ucdavis.edu)
--
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Mr. Bones.

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Jul 5, 1996, 3:00:00 AM7/5/96
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Morgan Burke (mor...@sitka.triumf.ca) wrote:
: I'd like to put LILO on the master boot record of /dev/hda so I can
: boot Linux without a floppy. However, /dev/hda contains no Linux
: partitions (which are all on /dev/hdc). Furthermore, hda is a small
: IDE drive, whereas hdc is big IDE.
:
: The HOWTOs tell me I should include an "append=2484,16,63" and "linear"
: line in /etc/lilo.conf to tell LILO about the big IDE drive, but I'm
: afraid that it is going to apply this info to hda instead and trash my
: primary drive. Is this a concern?
:
: -- Morgan Burke
: mor...@sitka.triumf.ca

Morgan, this sounds similar to my setup so I'll just tell you
what mine is and you can go from there.

My system has a 340M ide as /dev/hda which is linux+swap I boot
off this drive. With the small drive, Lilo doesn't need any
special parameters, AFAIK (read the docs!). I dual boot dos
which is on /dev/hdb which is a 1.5Gig EIDE. Lilo has no problem
booting dos from this large drive. I see your system looking like this:
/dev/hda has lilo on the MBR and is the disk that is used to boot from.
your root partition will be on that disk and you will simply mount
/dev/hdc and /dev/hdb(?) when linux starts.
Hope this helps. If not, drop me a line.
--

Michael Sterrett
-Mr. Bones.-
mste...@css.tayloru.edu

bill davidsen

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Jul 10, 1996, 3:00:00 AM7/10/96
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In article <4rf87a$q...@nntp.ucs.ubc.ca>,

Morgan Burke <mor...@sitka.triumf.ca> wrote:
| I'd like to put LILO on the master boot record of /dev/hda so I can
| boot Linux without a floppy. However, /dev/hda contains no Linux
| partitions (which are all on /dev/hdc). Furthermore, hda is a small
| IDE drive, whereas hdc is big IDE.
|
| The HOWTOs tell me I should include an "append=2484,16,63" and "linear"
| line in /etc/lilo.conf to tell LILO about the big IDE drive, but I'm
| afraid that it is going to apply this info to hda instead and trash my
| primary drive. Is this a concern?

No. And I wouldn't put in any stuff unless you need it to boot from
floppy. I haven't had to do that since about Slackware 2.1, although
some controllers in mapped mode may confuse things.

I would expect no problems at all, I boot partitions off non-IDE
drives from a root IDE, so if there's a problem it's subtle.
--
-bill davidsen (davi...@tmr.com)
"As a software development model, Anarchy does not scale well."
-Dave Welch

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