Brian,
I tried your suggestion last night and it had no effect. However when I added the line
'prompt'
Voila! A menu! Then I just had to rearrange the order of the OSs in lilo.conf and comment out the ones I didn't want to appear.
I am now very happy with the menu.
Thanks for your help.
Ron
-----Original Message-----
From: Brian Parish [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Tuesday, 9 March 2004 3:36 PM
To: newbie
Subject: Re: [newbie] Multi-boot with LILO and Mandrake
On Tue, 2004-03-09 at 15:40, Ron Joordens wrote:
> Hello Everyone,
>
> I have just installed Mandrake on a system which already had Windows
> XP and FreeBSD installed on it. I want to be able to choose which OS
> to use at boot time. However, I am given no menu to choose from and
> the default Mandrake starts automatically.
>
> LILO is installed in the MBR. I had a look at the lilo.conf file and
> saw that Mandrake saw the pre-existing windows partition and added the
> relevent lines to the file. It did not add lines for FreeBSD. I was
> able to add FreeBSD using the tools available in the configuration
> menu. However still no options appear to choose OS on bootup.
>
> I have discovered that if I manually change the default in lilo.conf,
> I can boot Windows and FreeBSD successfully. However doing so entails
> changing lilo.conf, running lilo to install to MBR, rebooting to other
> OS. Then to boot to another OS, I have to boot Mandrake using a boot
> floppy and change it again.
>
> So how do I change lilo.conf to enable a menu. I was under the
> impression through reading the man pages that the menu was enabled by
> default. Following is my lilo.conf file:
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> boot=/dev/hda
> map=/boot/map
> vga=normal
> default="Mandrake_Linux"
> keytable=/boot/us-latin1.klt
> nowarn
> message=/boot/message
> menu-scheme=wb:bw:wb:bw
> image=/boot/vmlinuz-enterprise
> label="Mandrake_Linux"
> root=/dev/hda5
> initrd=/boot/initrd-enterprise.img
> append="devfs=mount hdc=ide-scsi splash=silent"
> read-only
> image=/boot/vmlinuz
> label="linux"
> root=/dev/hda5
> initrd=/boot/initrd.img
> append="devfs=mount hdc=ide-scsi splash=silent"
> vga=788
> read-only
> image=/boot/vmlinuz
> label="linux-nonfb"
> root=/dev/hda5
> initrd=/boot/initrd.img
> append="devfs=mount hdc=ide-scsi"
> read-only
> image=/boot/vmlinuz
> label="failsafe"
> root=/dev/hda5
> initrd=/boot/initrd.img
> append="failsafe devfs=nomount hdc=ide-scsi"
> read-only
> other=/dev/hda1
> label="Windows"
> table=/dev/hda
> other=/dev/fd0
> label="floppy"
> unsafe
> other=/dev/hda2
> table=/dev/hda
> label="FreeBSD"
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> The man page also says that the /boot/message file is limited to
> approximately 65,000 bytes. My /boot/message file is 102KB and is
> filled with unreadable hieroglyphics. Here's a sample:
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *
> 6 X
> +|#x 2lq€ ?'z
> *|>V-ڶ;S*wˆ[EMAIL PROTECTED]˜'š=S!8t ;‡McŸ
> ˜HHH~<<==0000 333""????>>>qq;;yyyFFFF&&&&& ppp 9999
>
> ˜HHH~~<<=0000 333""???>>>qq;;yyFFFF&&&&& ppp 9999
>
> ˜HHH~<<==00000 333""????>>q;;yyyFFFF&&&&& ppp 9999
>
> ˜HHH~<<==0000 33""????>>>qq;;yyFFFF&&&&& ppp
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Isn't this supposed to be a readable text file that shows the message
> to display like for example.
>
> LILO Menu
> 1 - Windows
> 2 - Mandrake
> 3 - FreeBSD
>
> Also my /boot/map file is filled with the same type of hieroglyphics
> and is 119KB in size.
>
> Can anyone give me any pointers on how to modify my lilo.conf file to
> get a menu? Or is it the message and map files that are at fault?
>
> Also on another related issue. When I tried to create my Mandrake boot
> floppy for Mandrake Enterprise it failed because it was too big to
> fit on a floppy. I had to create one with the other kernel mdk. How do
> I create one for the enterprise kernel?
>
> Everytime I boot from the floppy it detects changes to the hardware
> and asks if I want to load the tools to configure them. Then when I
> boot from the hard disk, it again detects new hardware. Anyone know
> why this is?
>
> Thanks in advance for your help.
>
> Ron Joordens
> Melbourne
Try adding:
timeout=100
after the nowarn line in your lilo.conf, then run lilo to rebuild the
boot manager. I suspect that without this, you get the menu for 0
seconds before it boots the default image.
HTH
Brian
(also Melbourne!)
<< File: message.footer >>
