Mandrake & LILO in mbr - can't boot from hda3

[x]

I'm currently running Mandrake8, booting (lilo) from hda3, this has worked fine.
Now I installed Mandrake9, but installed lilo in mbr - want to hold them apart since I'm not sure which version I'll keep.
Booting from mbr is no problem, but the strange thing is I can't change it! Using fdisk I mark hda3 as active, not hda1 - still Mandrake 9's lilo menu appears.
Does lilo in mbr mean you can't boot from any other partition? This would be crazy - you can definitely have bootloaders in mbr but boot from other (primary) partitions.

[CP]

<edit> My post made no sense whatsoever so I'll try again </edit>
I don't quite understand your problem? Could you explain it moreso for me? Where have you got mandy 8 and 9 installed? Do you have any other OS's installed? Can you boot them both alright? Sorry for all the questions, I'm a little sleepy right now.
Cheers
CP

[x]

OK, I'll try again:

Mandrake 8 has / on hda8, /boot on hda3.
Win98 on hda1
With hda1 marked active, Win98 boots.
With hda3 marked active, I get lilo's bootmenu.

Now I install Mandrake9, / on hda8, lilo written to mbr.
No matter which partition I mark as active, I always boot from mbr - that is, Mandrake 9's lilo-bootmenu comes up.

The problem is not booting any OS, but if I choose to boot from hda3 it should boot from hda3 and nothing else!

[pwrhouse]

Have you tried adding Win98 and Mandrake 8 to the lilo configuration that is written to the MBR.

I am not positive about this but I think that it is going to give you the bootmenu that is written to the MBR no matter which partition you have set active.

Hope this helps

[CP]

But if its in the MBR, then wont it come up before anything else? If you want lilo only installed in hda3, go into mandrake 8, run /sbin/lilo, mark partition 3 as active. Go into mandrake 9 and you need to remove this lilo from the MBR. Run
/sbin/lilo -u
See if that fixes it for you.
CP

[pwrhouse]

Yeah, in the MBR I believe it will be the first thing loaded no matter what partition you have set active.

I think he is trying to have seperate bootloaders for each OS he has installed.

I would uninstall lilo from the MBR like CP said and configure the lilo you have installed on hda3 to load all of the OSs you have on the computer and set hda3 as the active partition like CP said.

[horus]

Looking over this thread, let me see if I can help out some....

LILO uses a file called lilo.conf (full path: /etc/lilo.conf) to set up "stanzas" that hold the various selections available at boot time. You have a choice of where to put LILO during installation - on the Master Boot Record, or on a /boot partition. Installation to the MBR is most usual, as this allows LILO to manage all the different OS startups possible on a given system.

A typical lilo.conf might look like this: (example from a RH 6.0 system)
explanations are interspersed in braces {}.

boot=/dev/hda
map=/boot/map

{these two lines tell where the system will look for bootup and map info.}

install=/boot/boot.b

{this gives the location for the second stage of the lilo startup routine.}

prompt
timeout=50

{this forces the lilo: prompt onto the console and keeps it there for 50/10ths of a second, or 5 seconds.}

default=Win95

{since this line is present, the first stanza below is no longer the default boot option - it belongs to "those other guys" now.}

image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.2.5-15
label=linux
root=/dev/hda8
initrd=/boot/initrd-2.2.5-15
read-only

{this is the stanza for the linux system boot. The image line gives the name and location of the compressed kernel image we will be booting from. The label gives the name that must be entered after the lilo: prompt to boot this stanza. The root line identifies where the / partition is for this boot. The initrd line tells lilo where to find the second stage of the kernel load, and read-only directs lilo to load the filesystem as such.}

other=/dev/hda1
label=Win95
table=/dev/hda

{This minimal stanza is all that is required to boot from a non-Linux OS. Note that this need not be a Win95 boot. Just because the label says Win95 doesn't mean we couldn't, for example, be booting an MS-DOS 6.22 system or even a Win NT 4.0... so long as the partition table for that OS is found on /dev/hda.

Now, in newer systems, you may see a "graphical" lilo screen which responds to ncurses commands to allow for selection of which boot stanza you wish to use, but /etc/lilo.conf is still essentially the same. Note that there are other options in LILO that I did not cover here... some of them are pretty spiffy. A good place to go for further info is the LILO-Mini-HOWTO.

To add a new boot stanza to /etc/lilo.conf, simply open it in a text editor, add the new stanza, save, and then, after you exit the editor, run /sbin/lilo from a shell prompt to update the boot record. I'm not 100% certain of it, but I believe that you'll probably want to be logged in as root or a superuser to do this.

The real bugger with LILO is the 1024 cylinder limit. If you are not using Logical Block Addressing to correct for it, make sure you locate any boot records within the first 1024 cylinders. If you use the MBR of the first disk, this is usually not a problem.

For more flexible and powerful boot management, you may wish to look into GRUB instead of LILO. Personally, I find GRUB to be a lot more complex, but it can do things LILO can't (I use GRUB on my dual-boot IBM Thinkpad, for example).

Hope this helps out a bit. There's an even better explanation of LILO in the book "Running Linux" from O'Reilly & Associates.

Later On,
horus

[horus]

[quote author=x link=board=1;threadid=6090;start=0#57880 date=1042642941]
OK, I'll try again:

Mandrake 8 has / on hda8, /boot on hda3.
Win98 on hda1
With hda1 marked active, Win98 boots.
With hda3 marked active, I get lilo's bootmenu.

Now I install Mandrake9, / on hda8, lilo written to mbr.
No matter which partition I mark as active, I always boot from mbr - that is, Mandrake 9's lilo-bootmenu comes up.

The problem is not booting any OS, but if I choose to boot from hda3 it should boot from hda3 and nothing else!

[/quote]

Hmm... you're not the only one who needed two tries at this. Let me see...

You're marking hda3 as the active partition using Linux fdisk? *Then* you are writing a LILO boot record to hda3? Did I read that rightly? (If not, please pull my cranium from my nether orifice gently so the pressure release doesn't blow my head off...) ;-)

Okay... so LILO is installing to the MBR on hda3. That's why when you boot into hda3 all you see is the lilo: prompt, followed by whatever default boot is lined up.

Do you see a lilo: prompt booting from hda1 before windows comes up? If so, it's possible you are running LILO both places with the same (or two identical but separate) lilo.conf file(s).

Be any or all of that as it may be, the real crux here is that whenever you point at hda3, LILO runs, hence somewhere in the proceedings you (or the Mandrake install) must have written a LILO boot recored to that location. Mandrake is historically sort of sneaky about asking you where you want LILO... (at least it was back in Mandrake 6, 7.2 and 8...)

Did I get any closer to the truth this try?

Later On,
horus

[x]

Hmmm..... I'm obviously not very good at writing questions...
I do not have any problem with booting the OS I want to boot. I want to know why things happen the way they do:
Bootsectors are written in MBR + on hda2 & hda3.
OK, I'll try to explain why:
I always have one OS as my 'main' system, I don't want to mess around with it. This system boots from hda3 using lilo. Today this system is Mandrake 8.0
If I want to try some other distro, I don't want to install it's lilo/boot header on hda3. I could use a floppy, but I prefer to be able to boot from the fixed disk.
hda2 holds Debian 2.2, I installed it a few months ago. Marking hda2 as active resulted in Debian booting (displaying lilo's bootmenu first, as specified in Debian's lilo.conf).
Of course, if I want to keep a second distro, I edit Mandrake8's lilo.conf & boot from hda3.
This has worked fine until now.
When I installed Mandrake 9, I choose to install lilo in MBR (only place left). After doing this I can no longer boot from hda3!
In the normal startup-procedure, BIOS goes first to MBR - but only to look for an active partition. It then passes control to the PBR on this partition.
Some of yoy says that with lilo in the MBR it will be the first thing loaded no matter what partition you have set active, but it shouldn't.
With other boot-loaders installed in MBR - WinNT's for instance - you boot from the partition marked active & not necessarily from MBR.
My question is:
Why does not lilo under Mandrake allow me to boot from hda3?
Is lLILO doing something, is it a Mandrake issue - or is there a problem with my disk?

[horus]

Hi, x,

You're not so bad at formulating questions, this is just a fairly complex scenario.

{Beg your pardon if I seem disjointed in my reply - my time sense is really messed up right now - I've been up for too long.}

Part of my confusion arises here from not knowing the difference between Master Boot Records on hda3, hda2, or hda1, I think.

In reality, there is only one Master Boot Record for any system, and that's the one on the first track of the first physical drive, hda. If LILO exists there, it will run and use whichever lilo.conf file it is pointed at, to the exclusion of anything else.

(I don't know it for a fact one way or the other, but it may be possible to point LILO on the MBR to another install of LILO somewhere else to yield a "cascade" effect, but that seems kind of redundant. Just add the stanzas for your various boot configurations to /etc/lilo.conf, and install LILO in only one place. That should eliminate any confusion, and cure your boot problems.)

That's why I asked the questions about what you saw when the system boots from different locations - the details of that will help noodle out what's going on. It's harder for the rest of us because we can't see what you are seeing, that's all.

Now, when you speak of LILO being installed on hda3, how do you boot from there? What passes the system the location of the boot record on hda3? Answer that question, and we should figure out what's happened here. Examine all your lilo.conf files if there are more than one. See if you can spot the problem from differences between them.

I'm up a little late just now, and I've had a long day, so I apologize for not taking more time with this. I'll give it another look later today (after I wake up) and hopefully I'll have more insight. Sorry. Don't mean to be terse and cryptic, just need some sleep.

Later On,
horus