> This is a big bummer and the waste of a morning... > > I bought a fancy new machine (one of those E-Cube mini sytems... it's > very neat, and glows BLUE!). I installed my freshly downloaded > powerpack, with XFS root and XFS home.
If you are going to use an XFS root, you need a /boot which is not XFS. This has something to do with the compatablity SGI wants to keep with the on-disk format used by Irix XFS, which is incompatible with what LILO wants to put there on any partition containing a kernel you want to boot. I was under the impression drakx warned you about this. > > At the lilo section of drakx, I asked for lilo to be installed to MBR. > I got this message: Fatal error, filesystem would be destroyed by LILO > boot sector /dev/hda. > > But then it just goes on with the lilo setup. No way to go back. After > the lilo step, I got the same error again, and no bootloader was > installed. Grrr. > > So I reran drakx, and this time chose 'upgrade' instead of 'install', > hoping I could change the configuration to install bootloader to root. > But no, I was not asked that question, it just kept trying to install to > MBR. > > So I reran drakx, doing another complete install. This time I chose to > install the bootloader to root. The error: You cannot install the > bootloader to an XFS partition. Awesome. Once again, instead of going > back and letting me select MBR, it goes on into the LILO setup forever. I don't think that would help. Either, make a small ext3 root filesystem, and use XFS for data partitions (this is my suggestion, since it's about the safest), or make an ext2/3 /boot partition. BTW, on servers, I typically install with a small root ext3 filesystem, /usr and /tmp ext3, /var and data partitions on LVM, usually XFS. This avoids the root on LVM issues, but still gets you the majority of the LVM benefit (resizing partitions which can vary greatly in required capacity). Regards, Buchan
