Solved: Boot off non-BIOS SCSI drive - can I use LILO or SysLinux?

1999-12-14 Thread Brian Boonstra 
Hi

Well, Her Majesty's empire really came through for me!  Thank you to  
David and Frank for your help.

Frank was right about booting off the non-BIOS SCSI disk...for some  
reason, it does work (and, as he hinted, the magic incantation to LILO seems  
to be linear).  I did not end up needing to try loadlin, though that looks  
like a fine solution.

Incidentally, because I share this box with others (hence my  
hesitation to touch the IDE drive), I wanted something a little more  
user-friendly in the boot loader.  I had an old copy of System Commander  
around, so I tried installing it.
It would not see the second drive even though LILO did, but it has  
an option to boot from a MBR saved to a file.  So I used dd to save the  
LILO MBR to a file on the Dos/Win partition. System Commander was then able  
to boot Win98 directly, and to chain-boot LILO.


Thanks, guys,

Brian

Boot off non-BIOS SCSI drive - can I use LILO or SysLinux?

1999-12-13 Thread Brian Boonstra 
Hi

I have a system with Windows 95 on an IDE drive, and Debian potato  
on a SCSI drive, hung off of an old DPT PM2021/9x controller.  This  
controller does not appear to be mapping the SCSI disk to D: like I had hoped  
and expected.

Presumably, I cannot use LILO to dual-boot the machine (after all,  
how would the machine let LILO see the partition with the kernel?).  Up to  
now, I have been booting off of a floppy, and that is torture.  But it seems  
SysLinux might be able to do the job.  How might I use it?  Can I call it  
from Win95, or only after an MS-DOS boot?  I took a look at

/usr/share/doc/syslinux/syslinux.doc

and it seems that booting from DOS mode would not be a problem, so long as I  
keep a copy of the kernel around, but I'm not so sure of this business of  
messing with the MBR.  Where would that get me?


Brian

Re: Boot off non-BIOS SCSI drive - can I use LILO or SysLinux?

1999-12-13 Thread Frank Copeland 
Brian wrote:

   Presumably, I cannot use LILO to dual-boot the machine (after all,  
how would the machine let LILO see the partition with the kernel?).  Up to  
now, I have been booting off of a floppy, and that is torture.

Have you actually tried LILO? I have a SCSI-only box that the BIOS thinks
has no disks at all (there isn't even a floppy drive) and it boots quite
happily from the SCSI root disk. The only gotcha was that I had to put the
linear option in /etc/lilo.conf, but you may not find that necessary.

Frank