See if you can boot off a floppy or linux CD and have a look at your /etc/lilo.conf
Make sure that the place that lilo installs is what you want. If you want lilo to control the initial startup of your machine, then it will go into the first sector of your hard drive, and will be either /dev/hda or /dev/sda (for IDE and SCSI respectively) If you use a different boot manager (like the NT boot menu, or BeOS bootman), and you want it to switch to lilo for booting linux, then you will probably want to install it to the first sector of your linux root partition, this will be /dev/hdaX or /dev/sdaX where X is the number of your root partition, starting at 1. If you can't figure it out, post your lilo.conf here. I have had trouble like this when using a system that had both a SCSI and an IDE disk on it, where the IDE drive was the master on the first IDE controller, and I'd set the SCSI adapter's BIOS so that I booted off the SCSI drive. This had the pleasing effect for me that I booted Linux off the scsi if it was turned on, but Windows off the IDE if the SCSI was turned off. Somehow Lilo was confused by this and would just start to run and then stop functioning. If that's what your problem is, I think the solution would be to set your bios to boot off of whatever drive has windows on it, and configure the other drive so it can't ever be taken to be the boot drive. You can boot linux off a second drive with Lilo (so what I was doing wasn't really the right solution, but it made my wife happy), but you can't boot Windows 98 off a second drive. (You can boot NT and Windows 2000 off a second drive though). An alternative is to use grub, http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/ I don't know if grub is available as a debian package - I see grub-doc in dselect, but not grub itself. An advantage to grub is that you don't need to reinstall your block disk if you change kernels, and if you forget to install a kernel in grub's menu, you can use its command line to load the kernel manually. It is not yet at 1.0 but it works well on my x86 machines. Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.goingware.com/ Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
