Ok LILO doesn't always work well booting from other than the primary disk so try to set up the boot sector on Drive A or else trudge through the extensive and obtuse documentation of the world's best bootloader, GRUB, which will do everything but put out the cat once you become familiar with the command structure which seems arcane to many.
make /boot ext2 or ext3 and put it on the primary IDE drive. If there are multiple systems to boot, make /boot big enough to hold 2-3 boot images for each one. On my test platforms which can boot 7.1, 7.2, corpo, 8.0, and 8.1 and have room for more besides, I use a 250M /boot. A usual single system size is 7-10Mb, and for a triple boot where one of them is windows, 20-30 Mb is plenty. Please note that if you use RH7.2 as one of the systems, /boot can be ext3. This does not mean that any other partition of the Mandrake setup has to be ext3. Speed penalties are significant in our tests for this particular filesystem. If you set it up as ext2 that is OK as well, because ext2 and ext3 are capable of on-line conversion from one to the other. OK, how would one go about this? There4 are many answers, but I will give my method which seems simplest to me. I map out all the systems I want, first. Usually I keep /home on a separate partition and use only _one_ /home directory for all systems. For a system to be easily "upgradable" by install, it is a good idea to make separate partitions for /var (especially if servers will be used), /home and /usr/local and possibly /root. If significant commercial software is planned to be installed, then a separate /opt is a very good idea. Of course for test systems which are updated with update and reloaded a lot, I keep it simple, /boot (only one), /home (only one) and / for each system. Part of this is habit because before 8.1, there were only sixteen partition numbers (for a maximum of 15 usable partitions) for an ide drive predefined. With devfs they don't have to be predefined so that artificial barrier is no longer operative in 8.1. So for a test system here is a typical map /dev/hda1 Starts out as a formatted and blank win partition covering the whole disk, just to test installation. /dev/hda2 /boot Usually only one of two partitions linux on hda /dev/hda3 swap Usually I have one swap on each drive*** /dev/hdc1 extended (base for all extended partitions on hdc /dev/hdc5 / for 8.1 which is the first installed the rest of this partition table is for the 8.1 install /dev/hdc6 /home /dev/hdc7 /71sys /dev/hdc8 /72sys /dev/hdc9 /corposys /dev/hdc10 /80sys /dev/hdc11 /82sys /dev/hdc12 /spare1 /dev/hdc13 /spare2 /dev/hdc14 /mnt/iso (common to all systems) For each of the other systems, partitions and mount points are the same, except for example 8.0 wopuld have /dev/hdc10 as / and /dev/hdc5 as 81sys. Now I install 8.1 first and set up the complete partiton table and print myself a copy of it; then I install 7.1 and use expert mode (you cannot pull this trick without it) so that I just name the partitions already made (some might be in a journaling fs so will be unrecognizable to earlier installers and unreadable....) and just add the names again.--Oh yes, /boot is named /spare3 so that the /boot for 7.1 is assumed to be part of /, and I write myself a note to delete /etdc/lilo.conf from 7.1. When bootloader installattion comes up, I cancel it! Not I fire up 8.1 (all I can boot and in an xterm as /root or using the file manager in superuser mode, I drag the actual boot kernel(s) for 7.1 and the initrd for 7.1 the system map for 7.1 over to the 8.1 /boot. I then add these image names to a new LILO or GRUB boot record which I can do with an editor on /etc/lilo.conf or by using DraskBoot (Boot configuration in Mandrake Control Center). The important thing is to pick the numbered vmlinuz and initrd.img and System,Map from 7.1 and bring them to the /boot directory, then add the records to bootable systems. Don't try to bring vm;inuz or initrd.img or System.map because those are only links to the real thing which will list as something like vmlinuz-2.2.14-15mdk.... For the new boots added to LILO or GRUB configuration, the root must be defined as /dev/hdc7 which is the / for the 7.1 system. OK so there you have it. /boot is from an easy to manage system and a recent one is nice so enhancements are available. Other systems boot out of that /boot but do not mount their own (unused) /boot sectors there--only the records for booting those systems are dragged there by hand. Only one bootloader is used, and it is the one set up by the first system loaded. Boot records for the other systems are added using, in my case, Standard mandrake tools (or jed on /etv/lilo.conf if I am in a hurry) are used for adding these boot records once files for starting the various systems have been moved to /boot. Now this may seem complicated, but it gets really complicated if you have bootloaders overwriting what they think are outdated systems being upgraded. If you want multipople linux boots, especially for different versions of the same distro, this is the _simple _ way to do it. Civileme
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