LILO boot floppy

[Kevin O'Gorman]

On Tue, Jun 18, 2002 at 10:21:27PM +0000, Anita Lewis wrote:
> On Mon, 17 Jun 2002 19:32:26 -0700, Kevin O'Gorman wrote:
> > I used to build LILO boot floppies all the time.  They had a very
> > small filesystem, with /dev/*, /boot/* and /etc/lilo.conf, a kernel
> > and sometimes an initrd.  They were maintained, if I recall, by
> > mounting them, them doing 
> >    /sbin/lilo -r /mnt/floppy
> > 
> > However, nowadays when I try that on RH 7.1, i get an error
> >     Fatal: open /dev/fd0: Permission denied 
> > 
> > I do this as root, of course, and so I have to ask what more
> > permission do I need?  The floppy contains /dev/fd0, identical
> > to that on the real filesystem, with the same permissions.
> > 
> > Anyone have a clue?  Anyone have a SxS?
> > 
> > ++ kevin
> > 
> 
> The way I make a lilo boot floppy is to modify /etc/lilo.conf so that the
> top line is boot=/dev/fd0 instead of /dev/hdxx.  Then I put a floppy in and
> run /sbin/lilo.  The resulting floppy gives me a lilo prompt and boots the
> kernel on the hard drive.  Is that what you are looking for?  I usually then
> change /etc/lilo.conf back to what it was for when I next need to update
> LILO in the mbr.

Not exactly what I'm after.  It's okay for the LILO setup to point
to things on the hard drive, but I want at least one kernel on the 
floppy.  This is what saves me when I've deleted a partition, so that
the partition numbers are all messed up, or worse yet have moved a
partition so there's no kernel where the floppy thinks it should be.
I do this a lot.

It used to be handy: the floppy was it's own self-contained universe,
and the running system would visit it briefly to re-run LILO in the
chroot jail, so that the /etc/lilo.conf file could refer to things
where they were in relation to the floppy.  This worked on all Caldera
systems where I tried it (from way back on CND).  I don't remember
if I've tried this on RedHat before.

It's not too hard to build a secondary lilo.conf, which points to
/dev/fd0, and knows about a kernel on /mnt/floppy, but it doesn't have
the same feel to it.  Sigh.  I'll get over it.

++ kevin

-- 
Kevin O'Gorman  (805) 650-6274  mailto:kevin at kosmanor.com
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