On Mon, Oct 03, 2005 at 01:06:16PM -0500, Jason Martens wrote: > >>>I believe your /boot partition needs to be on a non LVM partition. > >>Well, I can boot just fine with a root partition on the LVM volume using > >>LILO. I believe this is because my initrd has the LVM drivers included, > >>so it can recognize the root partition. > >he said /boot, not 'root'. > Ah, so he did. However, as I said earlier, I can boot even though I > have no /boot partition, and root is in LVM.
There is a difference between lilo and grub in how they find the disk sectors containing the kernel image and the initial ram disk. Lilo determines the sector numbers while linux is running (before the reboot), when you issue the command "lilo". It stores these numbers in a map file, the sector numbers of which are in turn determined and stored in a reserved region of the lilo boot sector. On bootup, lilo simply loads the predetermined sectors - first the map file, then the kernel image and optionally an initial ram disk. This way, lilo does not need any special support for LVM, it can just make use of the underlying OS drivers to find the sectors. Grub tries to find the sectors containing the kernel image during the boot process. To that end, it has a built-in driver for the root partition's filesystem. When installing grub as boot loader, a suitable variant of grub with the correct filesystem driver was chosen (this explanation is somewhat simplified). In order to load a kernel image from a filesystem stored on an LVM volume, grub would need to support LVM read access in addition to the filesystem. I didn't verify it, but I suspect there is no grub version with such support. Regards, Mirko -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]