LILO mini-HOWTO

8. Booting from a Rescue Floppy

Next, I installed Windows-95 on my office system. It blew away my nice Lilo MBR, but it left my Linux partitions alone. Kernels take a long time to load from floppy, so I made a floppy with a working Lilo setup on it, which could boot my kernel from the IDE.

I made the lilo floppy like so:

  fdformat /dev/fd0H1440      #  lay tracks on virgin diskette
  mkfs -t minix /dev/fd0 1440 #  make file system of type minix
  mount /dev/fd0 /mnt         #  mount in the standard tmp mount point
  cp -p /boot/chain.b /mnt    #  copy the chain loader over
  lilo -C /etc/lilo.flop      #  install Lilo and the map on the diskette.
  umount /mnt

Notice that the diskette must be mounted when you run the installer so that Lilo can write its map file properly.

This file is /etc/lilo.flop. It's almost the same as the last one:

#  Makes a floppy that can boot kernels from HD.
boot = /dev/fd0
map = /mnt/lilo-map
delay = 100
ramdisk = 0
timeout = 100
prompt
disk = /dev/hda     # 1 GB IDE, BIOS only sees first 500 MB.
   bios=0x80
   sectors = 63
   heads = 16
   cylinders = 2100
image = /vmlinuz
  append = "hd=2100,16,63"
  root = /dev/hda2
  label = linux
  read-only
  vga = extended
other = /dev/hda1
  label = msdos
  table = /dev/hda
  loader = /mnt/chain.b

Finally, I needed MS-DOS 6.2 on my office system, but I didn't want to touch the first drive. I added a SCSI controller and drive, made an msdos file system on it with Linux' mkdosfs, and Windows-95 sees it as "D:". But of course MSDOS will not boot off of D:. This is not a problem when you have Lilo. I added the following to the lilo.conf in Example 2.

other = /dev/sda1
  label = d6.2
  table = /dev/sda
  loader = /boot/any_d.b

With this modification MSDOS-6.2 runs, and it thinks it is on C: and Windows-95 is on D:.