Use lilo to boot another linux

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Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.setup
Date: Sat, 30 Nov 2002 06:09:08 +0000 (UTC)

> I tried to boot another Linux with lilo, but so far only failure, no
> success. If anyone can do it, would you post your lilo.conf please?
>
> The Linux that I want to boot is another distro, on another
> partition *and* on another disk. I've been trying to solve it again
> and again, but every time all that I can do is to bang my head on
> the wall...

Simplest which allows modifying the other distro without having to rerun this LILO is to put LILO for the other distro on a partition on that drive (primary or extended, not logical partition). Then you simply point your main lilo.conf to the partition with the other LILO as other just like Win95/98/ME:

other=/dev/hdb1 label=otherlinux

Another method is to mount the /boot partition or / if that is where boot is and then use the mounted path for image in lilo.conf:

Assuming mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt

image=/mnt/boot/vmlinuz label=otherlinux root=/dev/hdb1

LILO keeps track of the physical disk location of the image, so it will be able to find it while booting even though it is not mounted there during boot.

David Efflandt

Use lilo to boot another linux

> I tried to boot another Linux with lilo, but so far only failure, no
> success. If anyone can do it, would you post your lilo.conf please?

It might be a bit of a bodge, but the way I do it is to put the kernels for all the linuxes into the one /boot partition with names like vmlinuz-suse. The problem is, that when you run lilo, it looks at the kernel and maps its absolute location on the disk. So trying to get lilo to use other distros requires that the other kernels also be visible. (maybe you could mount the /boot or / partition of the other distribution and specify the kernels that way)

Either way, you then just need to say

image=/boot/vmlinuz.suse
root=/dev/hda<whatever>

Of course, the all in one /boot partition option means you have to manage the lilo config from a single distro. I suppose if you used Grub, you could just add any new kernels you wanted and edit grub.conf by just mounting the /boot as say, /mnt/boot, copying the files over and editing /mnt/boot/grub/menu.lst

spike1