Re: Using lilo to boot off any drive ...

[Randy Dunlap]

> Manish Lachwani wrote:
>> When the control is transferred to lilo on sda (sdb
>> actually), is there a way for me to boot off sdd now
>> (which was previously sde)? I mean, is there any way
>> that lilo can load the appropriate kernel image?
>
> You could have two independent installations of LILO, one on
> sda, and one on sdb, where the latter accesses no files from
> sda and defines the disk numbers (for the BIOS) the way they
> look when sda is removed.
>
> Then, you probably want to rename /sbin/lilo to /sbin/lilo.bin
> or such, and write a script /sbin/lilo that generates the
> modified lilo.conf files, and updates both instances of LILO.

This is probably too simplistic to be helpful..., but what I
do is put a modified/stripped-down bootsect.S (512 bytes) on a
floppy.  I can (theoretically) tell that code which hard drive
to boot from (like 0x80 or 0x81).  I haven't tried it with
more than 2 drives (don't have more than 2 drives).

And I install LILO on each target boot drive.  LILO complains
a little bit, but it still works.
~Randy