Alternative booting

[Claude Jones]

On Sat August 18 2007, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
> I used LILO for years, and I didn't have problems with it. But I
> also new how to handle mixed SCSI/IDE systems. There was no problem
> if the IDE controller only had optical drives, but if it had a hard
> drive, then lilo would install to the wrong drive if it was a SCSI
> boot. It is not supposed to have this problem any more, but I have
> not tested it. I do find that LILO works better when you are
> installing to a drive that does not have the same BIOS number as it
> will have when it is booted. For example, I have a system that boots
> off a PCMCIA hard drive. Because the system does not have a floppy
> or CD, I did the install on another system. (Actually, I did hte
> install manually from another Linux system.)  The drive was hde on
> the other system, but is hda when it is booted. So you tell LILO
> that /dev/hde is BIOS device 80 and install after running chroot to
> where the drive is mounted. You then remove that line so that LILO
> will not be confused when you do your next update. After moving the
> drive to the other machine, it boots fine. With Grub, you have to
> modify the device map file before running grub-install, and change
> it back after you install. (You are better off building device.map
> by hand, instead of letting grub-install do it.) It works, but it is
> more complicated. But at least with grub, you can tell it where to
> find the drive if you make a mistake, as long as you remember what
> partition /boot is.

aha! I'll mark this post important so it stays in my mailbox for future 
reference - I'm almost sure I've encountered this issue in the past, and 
didn't understand what was happening

-- 
Claude Jones
Brunswick, MD, USA