LILO booting off second IDE disk 1099

First some general comments, beginning by saying that I'm not absolutely sure that I can help you, but let's see ...

FTR, I'm using Mandriva 2006.0 with 2.6.12 & Lilo 22.6.1

As suggested, you might have problem booting from a slave ... I can't recall trying this myself.

Normally, the HD would be the master and the CD the slave.

FTR, an important difference between us is that my disks are all SCSI.

Ditto with the added complication of the Adaptec SCSI controller - you can choose the primary boot disk from within it's own BIOS and that determines which disk comes up as 0x80 with the others following in SCSI device number order.

Ok, let's have a look at what normally happens and then try and figure what isn't happening for you. You seem to know this already, but let's recap anyway to ensure our understanding of the process agrees.

1) BIOS determines boot disk

2) It loads and runs the first physical sector C=0,H=0,S=1 or LS=0 from that disk, which is the Master Boot Record (MBR).

3) That master boot record usually contains a boot loader in the first half-sector and a parbreastion table in the second

4) This boot loader then looks at the parbreastion table, finds the first parbreastion marked active (MS' FDisk only allows and usually there will only be the one), and loads and runs the first sector of that parbreastion, which is the Parbreastion Boot Record (PBR).

5) This PBR then loads and runs the Operating Sytem (OS) installed in that parbreastion in an OS-dependent way.

6) In theory then, an alternative boot loader only has only to list some or all of the active parbreastions on the disks and ask which MBR or, more commonly, PBR to boot. There is actually a generic boot floppy that offers to boot from any MBR or PBR it finds at boot-time on your system. This can be quite useful in debugging problems with the process. Usefully for you, it's part of the Slackware dist:

ftp:--ftp.mirror.ac.uk-sites-ftp.slackware.com-slackware-10.0-isolinux-sbootmgr

That's the theory, but in practice there are some pitfalls ...

One particularly important one is that the MBR installed by MS' FDisk doesn't work according to the above theory. It *buttumes* that it is running on HD0 (0x80) and IIRC actually has no way of knowing that it isn't. So, regardless of whichever disk it was *actually* loaded and run from, it will *always* read the parbreastion table from, and boot the first active parbreastion on, HD0!

Perhaps this could be part of what is happening to you? If you make up the SBootMgr floppy linked above, and find that when you choose to boot from an MBR on a disk other than HD0 the OS on HD0 is the one that actually loads, then that disk almost certainly has a Microsoft MBR.

Another pitfall is that alternative boot loaders are restricted by the sector size (actually, half-sector size: 0x100 bytes) in the level of intelligence they can reach, so nearly all load secondary code-data from elsewhere.

IFUIC, Lilo loads from the so-called 'map' file, and when you run the Lilo command, you aren't only installing an MBR but also this map file. Hence, the relative placement of the Lilo MBR and map file are important. Particularly, if you change drive designations after running the Lilo command, the MBR may then be unable to find the map file, and so hang.

If you haven't already found them, the Lilo HOW TO is here: ... and there's usually a crash rescue HOW TO here, though all you'll find right now is: "The LILO-crash-rescue-HOWTO has been removed for review." ... ... and the Lilo error codes, including the one you're getting, are explained in this link, though the explanations look a little out of date to me:

Moving on ...

marked as active disk

That sounds like the map file problem I mentioned earlier.

AIUI, what you would have to do to have any hope of this working, is to set up the disks how they would be in an emergency boot, then run Lilo to install the MBR and map file, then set them back to how you normally boot with them, possibly running Lilo again with a different conf file to set up the normal boot. You would have to ensure that the two boot processes were distinct - different MBRs involved, different map file names.

Certainly that happens when I do the same trick with the SCSI Adaptor BIOS ...

For the reasons explained above, when I boot MS parbreastions I use the switch 'master-boot'. I will explain my PC further at the end.

snip

No, I would suggest using geometry on a large HD is NOT advisable.

Unless the behaviour of Lilo has changed radically from earlier versions, I think earlier you must have been trying to do something slightly simpler, that didn't involve changing HD designations.

H all THs. I too have had a quite a lot of trouble getting my head round Lilo, which is partly why I'm writing at some length. You may think that I'm doing it for the love of the human race I have in my heart, and that's slightly true, but this forces me to document my hard earned knowledge on the subject, which I too will find useful :-)

My needs are slightly simpler, though I had thought of having a boot environment such as yours, but permanent in my case. At very least, I wanted and achieved a backup way of booting my system which comprises:

dev-sda1 Windows 2k test rig vanilla installdev-sdb1 Windows 98SE legacy installdev-sdc1 Mandriva Linuxdev-sdc2 Linux swap

I envisaged three booting scenarios, achieving them using the conf file appended by using the commands included:

1) Normal boot fromdev-sda, but having to put the map file ondev-sdb becausedev-sda has an OS that is RO from Linux. This means that the rest of the system will still boot even if Linux gets rodgered:

lilo -mmnt-win98-LiloMap.bin

2) If mucking about in W2K rodgereddev-sda's MBR or in W98 the map file ondev-sdb1, emergency boot into Linux fromdev-sdc using an SBootMgr floppy (previously it had been an MS MBR which would try and boot HD0 as mentioned above, so ifdev-sda's MBR was rodgered, this alternative didn't work):

lilo -mLiloMap.bin -bdev-sdc

3) Emergency boot from Linux floppy

lilo -c -mmnt-floppy-LiloMap.bin -bdev-fd0

(Naturally, the floppy must be mounted first! I also commented out the timeout in the conf file before running this command.)

lilo.conf ====== menu-breastle="Operating Systems Menu" menu-scheme="wb:Yc:wb:Wb" message="-etc-lilo.txt" boot="-dev-sda" LBA32 prompt timeout="50" vga="773" default="MandrivaLinux"

image=-boot-vmlinuz label="MandrivaLinux" root=-dev-sdc1 initrd=-boot-initrd.img append="resume=-dev-sdc5" vga=788

image=-boot-vmlinuz label="MandrivaFailSafe" root=-dev-sdc1 initrd=-boot-initrd.img append="failsafe resume=-dev-sdc5"

other="-dev-sda1" label="Windows2k" table="-dev-sda" master-boot

other="-dev-sdb1" label="Windows98" table="-dev-sdb" master-boot