[ILUG] Suse Followup ...

[Enda]

> > As long as you stay on lilo's mbr side you'll be just fine. Looking
> > through newsgroups and suse's support database, i've realised
> > how shitty
> > is their way to handle lilo. They've got the only lilo i know which
> > won't work even after you write it down on a partition other than the
> > mbr. I spent a couple of hours yesterday playing around with it and
> > things are not as bright as all the reviews said.

it will work away from home... i.e. the mbr, provided you can link the mbr
to where it is.

> I think you'll find this is standard! If you install it to a partition
then
> you need something in the MBR which allows you to boot the partition.
> I've no problems using the Boot Manager that comes with Ranish's
> Partition Manager and having lilo boot from /dev/hdb2.

Correct.... the only time you ever run into boot manager problems with SuSE
is when you install it as a dual boot system with an MS OS, the installation
recommends by default that you use loadlin instead of lilo to prevent
overwriting the windows bootloader. Ignoring this and installing on the
start of another partition is OK provided you dd the first 512 bytes of the
partition where you installed lilo, and move this file to the root of your
windows drive. You can then add a line to the windows boot loader to load
this file and tag it linux, thus allowing you to use the windows boot loader
to run the lilo from a non bootable partition. Two boot loaders to contend
with.... but nicer than using lilo as the primary boot loader if you already
have a dual ms system.

This may not be confined to MS type OS's, I've never treid a dual with
anything else, maybe it exhibits similar behavious with various other Dual
Boot installs, it will all come down to whether or not it recognises a
second OS on the machine, and a boot loader on the MBR. But I think windows
is the only OS that requires the target boot image to be stored locally on
the active partition, other OS's boot manager *should* be configurable to
load the "remote" os.

But in all cases you need a boot loader installed on the start of the active
partition....  its not a SuSE bug / failing, but rather a hardware
limitation due to the way in which common BIOS firmware is written.