lilo: "not the first disk"

[Kevin Chu]

Harvey Fishman wrote:

> Modern planar BIOSii usually allow you a lot more flexibility in the choice
> of the order of seeking devices to transfer control to.  My AMI planar BIOS
> in a SuperMicro system board allows a list of up to four devices to try for
> a boot device.  (Actually, I have the primary set to floppy, the secondary
> set to SCSI, and the tertiary and third and fourth choices disabled.)  But
> I think that the simplest way around this is to use Boot Manager from IBM
> OS/2, and place that on the first fixed disk whatever that is.  Boot
> Manager can vector you to any drive which it can see...i.e. any drive for
> which some driver is available at the time that Boot Manager executes.  It
> also allows you to choose your operating system.  Though LILO can probably
> do the same thing.  I use Boot Manager as my primary tool to choose between
> NT and Linux.  I use LILO as the seconday loader for Linux.

OS/2 Boot Manager is also limited to whatever devices the BIOS will
let you boot from.  On my particular machine, that is the first two
SCSI disks.  Boy did I have fun when I originally had Red Hat 5.1
installed on sdc and I was trying to boot it and couldn't understand
why it wasn't working.  :)  Like Harvey says, this is a BIOS problem. 
Once booted, however, you can see all the devices.  (I haven't had IDE
disks for a long time so I can't comment on those, but I do know my
BIOS will let me choose whether to boot from IDE or SCSI.)

Boot Manager is also not as tolerant of things like having two
partitions marked as bootable/startable, or inconsistent partition
information (see the fdisk man page).

Kevin

-- 
Kevin Chu               kevin at portal.ca
http://members.tripod.com/~super_kevin/

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