Hi:
I have had LM 6.1 running for some time and I finally decided to install LM 7.2
on a second disk, while keeping LM 6.1 on the first disk. What is now left
is to tidy up things so I can keep booting into either version until I am
satisfied that I can do away with LM 6.1.
My current setup is as follows:
LM 6.1 is on hda (/ is on /hda3) and LM 7.2 is on hdb (/ is on /hdb6). Since
the installation of LM 7.2, I can only boot into 7.2.
However I have a boot diskette of LM 6.1 so that, if I want to, I can simply
boot into 6.1. Before doing some irreversible things, I thought I would check
things out first. So here are a few quick questions:
1) During the install I was never asked to choose between LILO or GRUB. In
fact I have both a lilo.conf and a grub/menu.lst file if that means
anything. However I prefer using
LILO since I am somewhat familiar with it. How do I know which boot loader
was used during the installation? There is no LILO prompt as there was on LM6.1
(rather I see "stage1 stage2" before a menu appears), does this mean grub
has been used. If that is the case I guess I can still run LILO with an
appropriate configuration file?
Subquestion here: when I do an fdisk /dev/hdb and look at the partitions there
is an asterisk (*) in front of the boot partition (/dev/hdb1). I thought I had
asked for installation on the master boot record, not on the second disk boot
partition. (Thinking now about it, I think I toggled that asterisk myself when
I partitioned the disk before installing LM7.2). Anyhow if I run LILO again
with boot=/dev/hda, do I need then to toggle that asterisk off?
2) Supposing I can use LILO, I would like to modify the appropriate lilo.conf
file to be able to boot into either LM6.1 or LM7.2. I see no problem in running
lilo in either my 6.1 or 7.2 system, however there are some points I would like
to clear before doing this:
a) The global parameters in either lilo.conf file (both files are listed at
the end of this message) include the following:
map=/boot/map
install=/boot/boot.b
keytable=/boot/us.klt
message=/boot/message
The directory /boot is different between the LM6.1 and LM7.2 systems. How do
I deal with this? Or do I simply ignore it? I looked at the /boot directories
and the relevant files are clearly different (different sizes) and, in one case,
the file us.klt is inexistent (under LM 6.1). Is it a matter of just using it
as is and, no matter from which system I run lilo, it will just work as
long as the image files can be found!!!????
b) As for the image files, I suppose it is only a matter of mounting the "foreign"
disk and its boot partition so that it can be seen from whatever system (6.1 or
7.2)
from which I am running LILO.
3) Minor question: what is this "menu-scheme" line and what use does it have?
4) Is there an installation log kept somewhere? I would like to have a
look at it.
5) I did a "complete" installation and yet emacs is not there. Is this
normal?
Sorry for the lenght of the message and thanks for any help
(however minimal it may appear to you),
Serge Pineault
**** This is the lilo.conf file created after the LM 7.2 installation on hdb *****
boot=/dev/hda
map=/boot/map
install=/boot/boot.b
default=linux
keytable=/boot/us.klt
lba32
prompt
timeout=50
message=/boot/message
menu-scheme=wb:bw:wb:bw
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label=linux
root=/dev/hdb6
read-only
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label=failsafe
root=/dev/hdb6
append=" failsafe"
read-only
other=/dev/hda1
label=windows
table=/dev/hda
other=/dev/fd0
label=floppy
unsafe
***** This is my lilo.conf file for the LM 6.1 system *****
boot=/dev/hda
map=/boot/map
install=/boot/boot.b
prompt
timeout=50
other=/dev/hda1
label=win
table=/dev/hda
image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.2.13-7mdk
label=linux
root=/dev/hda3
read-only
