LILO likes me NOT

[Closer]

Asus A7V Athlon 1 gig Visiontek GF3 all works well with rh 7.1 but when i try to play with other distro,s my computer gets pissed. I have ide # 1 with a master hd and windows 98 and a creative labs cdrom as slave and ide #2 has master hd with rh 7.1 and a plextor cd-burner as slave, this all works well when i boot lilo pops up and ask me windows or linux and all is well. HOWEVER when a pop a differant hd on ide #2 as master and try to experiment with suse 7.1 or even progeny all installs fine and i follow the same lilo proceedures and put lilo on the MBR as i did with rh 7.1 . However on reboot all i get a L. No operating system will boot it just sits there leaving me staring at a L. Thing i do know is the second drive i put in is good becuase its new plus i tried another drive. I also tried reinstalling suse and tried every lilo option and combo they had to offer and i still get the L.

CLOSER

[slapNUT]

Probably when you originally set this up you had lilo installed on the MBR
of drive hda and the /boot is on the other drive hdcx which you are
swapping. So when you remove that drive and install another drive
lilo cannot find the secondary boot loader /boot/boot.b because it doesnt
exist. When you install lilo on that second drive it reads the MBR of
the first drive which is actually the lilo loader from the removed
drive. Since alot of important boot information is on that second drive
I dont know if it's possible to set up lilo to boot this way? Maybe if
both those drives you are swapping are identical with the same number
and size of partitions?
You would first have to restore that MBR onto hda:
dd if=/boot/boot.0300 of=/dev/hda bs=446 count=1
Then install linux on that second drive and run lilo. Then possibly if
you're lucky you could swap those drives and still dual boot.

Maybe someone knows of an easier way?

[wendo]

did you mount your windows patition if yes you may now have a corrupt version because you removed linux.
Try reinstalling windows and then reinstall linux.

I hope this helps.


Wendo