At first I couldn't see much advantage to this since it's a minor task to change a7 to b7 in lilo.conf after booting from floppy with b7mounted as root to run lilo and install the boot manager.
It would be a nice touch for lilo to do this though. It would mean you could boot several systems in an office with a single floppy even if the systems have different partition maps, as long as the labels are common. Like having a skeleton key to carry around. It would also enable me to boot correctly if I remove my a1 partition (Win95) even though Linux would move from a2 to a1 in that case. It sounds like a nice addition for lilo. While your at it why not fix lilo so it will look beyond the 1023'd cylinder. That would be a grreat fix as well. On Fri, 2 May 1997, Dave Cinege wrote: > I know this isn't a Debian question, but I have to start some place. > What list/NG would be *best* to submit a new idea for the kernel? > (actually maybe just lilo) > > Problem: partition and drive shift > Solution: Name partitions like in the old Amiga days > > How: Read the 'labels' of all partitions at start up and dynamiclly creates > entries in the /dev/ dir using that 'label' name with the correct > major/minor. > > Example: If I have linux installed on Logical partition 7 and put that drive > on another system, sda7 magically becomes sdb7 and linux will not boot with > out reconfiguring. This sucks. > > Example with fix: we mount /dev/linpar as root. We 'label' the linux > partiton linpar. The kernel starts up, and scans the labels of all the > partitions. It finds a type 83 with a label of linpar, and it creates a > /dev/linpar entry (or symlink) to the correct major and minor. > > If anything moves, linpar will always be linpar, no matter if it's > physically sda1, sda5, hdb1, etc. > > Taken even futher, the same works with type 06 (FAT) and 07 (HPFS) (maybe > others) partitions using the standard DOS label for the name of the > partitions. Similarly if you have a FAT partition you mount as /usr1 you > don't have to worry where it physically is, as long as it is named correctly. > > I'll offer to help code this, it really looks quite easy to do. > > ------------------------------------------------------------------ > Elite MicroComputers 908-541-4214 http://www.psychosis.com/emc/ > > > -- > TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to > [EMAIL PROTECTED] . > Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . > --Rick [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .
