LILO booting off second IDE disk 1105

iforone

Above info was not snipped; only as-for a reference to below

Hello again; In light of the various and very comprehensive responses you've received (while to me, some of which is still a tad bit perplexing to me), I'd like to try and simplify (sum up) in a few coherent sentences.

(In my examples I'll use your hda and hdb separate physical HDDs.)

In order to boot; ------------------- *A* MBR (CHS 0,0,1), locatedsomewhere-, *must* 1 be read in the beginning of the process. The BIOS ROM code is designed to explicity read the data in CHS 0,0,1.

Thatsomewherecould be hda, hdb, hdc, hdd, or sda, sdb, sdc, etc etc.

mostanywhere else-...specifically to any parbreastion(s) located on any HDD (non-removable media).

If thatanywhere elseresides on another 2nd separate physical HDD hdb , then the boot process for that 2nd physical HDD hdb is dependent upon the 1st physical HDD (hda's MBR) in order to boot.

Point is; a MBR ofsomething,somewhereneeds to be referenced by the BIOS. The BIOS of many mobos will *not* look past the MBR, (whose parbreastion table entries point elsewhere, either on the same HDD or another separate HDD).

In your particular situation, you do not want to touch the MBR on hda

This means that you would need to place (some partof) LiLo on the MBR of hdb - or you could placesomething elseon a MBR of hdb, orsomething elseon hda's MBR....or some other MBR located somewhere else.

(by 'something else', I mean another Boot manager-loader, or similar) ----------------

1 I've left out many variables in my above description, such as alternate BIOSes and HDDs located on PCI IDE Controller cards, SCSI cards (as described by another, in some depth) which have their own BIOS ROM code, ....RAID setups, Network boots, USB Drives, CF boots (as described by another) etc, etc.

NOTE: I *could* still be very wrong and am very open to correction at this point. I am *not* a know-it-all, and would gladly accept comments about where I may have erred.

There are also many other points that I could've talked about (such as the MS fiasco as it pertains to non-Standard Boot Records), and how there is more than the MBR involved in booting-multibooting (I call it the xMBR) ....but I chose to try and keep this post as simple as possible.

hope it all works out for you

Regards