I work in a very restrictive environment and I want to use linux on my work laptop (currently running Windows XP prof). I am planning to install linux in a dual boot mode but I dont want to install grub/lilo or any other boot loader. i cannot even modify Windows bootloader to boot into linux partition.
Is there a way I can boot into linux partition without installing new boot loader or modifying the current windows boot loader? Any boot CD etc available that can boot into linux partition from my laptops HDD?
I attempted to install slackware 13 on my laptop and was moderately successful. However in the process of attempting to configure it I appear to have messed something up. After reading about the problems I'm having I decided it would probably be easier to remove the current installation and start over.
I am now trying to install fedora from the dvd, but for some reason the computer will not boot the dvd. I have set the bios to boot from the drive first, and have tried burning the dvd twice, but every time the dvd spins up and shortly thereafter the computer loads lilo. Have I simply burned the dvd wrong twice? I used disk manager on mac os x and the disc reads just fine on the mac that burned it, but still no luck booting.
Im planning on installing a beta of my favorite distro to /dev/hdb from a mounted iso on an /dev/hda partition.Im not exactly a newbie, but i cant say i have ever done this before. Anyone aware of any issues i might encounter? Is lilo ok booting from one drive to another? Is it ok to just install lilo on the mbr of /dev/hda to boot a distro on /dev/hdb?
since ms dos wasn't meant to be booted from cd (it was used from floppy) and i have tried buring the contents of every ms dos floppy to a cd and no dice i am guessing that it needs a bootloader so i can boot up the setup wizard
before anyone suggests that this thread has nothing to do with linux i will just point out that this thread is asking about grub and that is a linux catagorie
I've run Debian on my laptop for quite some time now with no problems. I installed Slack to a new partition created in the free space of my hard drive, and I thik this was my mistake: I let Slack automatically configure the MBR with lilo (can't remember - I should stop operating on the MBR at 4 AM.) Now Slack runs just fine, but upon bootup I would like to be able to boot either Debian or Slack, but instead I just have a Slack splash and the only option is to press enter to boot Slack.
Code:
I believe sda1 is the root directory of my Debian install.
Code:
In the above table, sda10 is the swap I created for Slack and sda3 is the root directory for Slack. All other partitions were there before (my initial Debian install).
Thus my partitions are apparently intact and visible by the MBR (is it correct that the MBR holds the list of partitions on a disk?) but for some reason I don't have the option to boot Debian at all - just Slack.
I have a feeling this is a LILO/GRUB issue, but I don't know where to start.
EDIT: more poking around seems to reveal that it is the configuration of LILO that is the problem. Observe the following output:
I need to get LILO to boot a ramdisk in which the root file system is on /dev/ramdisk. I have tried many iterations of lilo.conf files. The following is one that I would think would work because it worked under 2.4 kernels:
I installed Ubuntu 10.04 on a spare partition, but didn't want to install Grub since I'm sure Ubuntu isn't going to be around for more than a little test drive. The problem I have is that lilo doesn't like the initrd.img file, complaining that it's too large. I'm assuming this file should be in the initrd line for the lilo entry. If someone is booting Ubuntu 10.04 with lilo it would be nice to see the lilo entry or any tips.
I'm running Ubuntu 10.10 with Lilo as my boot loader instead of Grub. I want to boot, temporarily, to a command line prompt instead of X-windows. How do I do this? Is there a combination of keys to press when the Lilo screen appears?
I am installing slackware 13 on a machine that already has slackware 64- current. I'm doing this to try LFS which needs a 32 bit host (I know about CFLS, but I'm trying to keep it simple). My current installation is on sda with / being on sda1. My new 32 bit installation is on sdb with / being on sdb2.
I didn't install LILO as I figured it would be easy enough to just edit the current lilo.conf and run lilo after rebooting from the installation and then rebooting again into the new 32 bit install. What keeps happening is that the system boots seemingly fine, but after some wierdness I realized that it is booting a kernel from the 64 bit install on sda1. I'm assuming this is a simple screw up in my lilo.conf but I'm not sure exactly how to fix it.
lilo.conf: Code: # LILO configuration file # generated by 'liloconfig' # # Start LILO global section # Append any additional kernel parameters: append=" vt.default_utf8=0 quiet"
I just formatted the partition that contains fedora 15 using windows.. Now when I attempt to boot my PC the grub bootloader comes up and I cannot boot anything.... The error that I get|| i feel i need a boot command to boot boot win7 from grub... grub propmts me " minimal bash-like line editing is supported. for the first word tab possible list a possible commands completion anywhere else tab list
I'm looking for an alternative boot loader (for hard drive) to get away from GRUB and LILO. I want something that is not bloated like GRUB and does not require rebuilding a table of block numbers like LILO. Something simple and basic ... like a boot loader should be.
I just installed Slackware 13.37, and it's my first version of Slack.
After installing, Grub was still installed on my system, but since it is supposed to boot an OS that's no longer on the hard drive by default, it drops to the Grub Rescue prompt every time I boot.
How can I boot Slackware from grub, or get lilo to boot my system instead of grub?
I have 2 drives, the first has Slackware 13.0 and FreeBSD 7.2. The second has Windows 7. Lilo configured to boot all three, no issues. Perfect. The first drive has 100GB of free space after FreeBSD and today I decided to install Open Solaris on that free space. The install failed, as in Solaris displayed such a message. I did read the Solaris install docs, etc. And it did mention no to install unless it preceded any Linux Swap partitions. There are, I did, but that's not my issue now.
After rebooting, it amazingly loaded FreeBSD by default. No Slackware. So I booted the slackware DVD, ran fdisk and made Slackware the default boot partition, yada yada. Now when it rebooted it gave a little message down in the left hand corner of the screen like "RRG B" highlighted in a red box. Now pressing enter will cause Windows 7 to boot from the second disk. I mounted the slackware partition from the DVD and am there now. Will just running lilo again put everything back to normal? Apparently Solaris left behind a piece of that ill behaved GRUB! (No flames!!!) :-) How do I make it go away?
I am thinking about maybe trying "LILO" [URL] ....
For my boot loader, from what I have read it sounds even more tempting.
I am totally sick of GRUB, even though it is what seems to be the most popular,and is what normally is used as the "default" when any linux system is installed, that is what the install ISO's use, but anyway, that is another topic, over the years, "grub failing", has been a problem for me , many times.
I have one install (Slack 12.2) on /dev/sda11, and GRUB (GNU GRUB 0.97) boots it without a problem. I just installed a new Slack 13.1 on /dev/sda1, and GRUB fails to boot it as follows:Quote:
grub> root(hd0,0) > Filesystem id type ext2fs, partition type 0x83 grub> kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda1
I usually install grub straight away after an install but this time it hasn�t worked for some reason after installing 13.1 on a new lappy. I have tried grub, grub2 (from sbo) and lilo; nothing I install into MBR will boot my slackware installation, I have to use the boot USB stick every time.
grub-legacy would be my preferred one so i�ll ask for help specifically with that. This is what im doing so far -
I somehow recalled a rule re the location of the boot partitions with LILO being required to be in the first part of the drive (1024 cylinders, it seems) and I found it indeed in an old doc:
Boot Partition: Your boot partition ought to be a primary partition, not a logical partition. This will ease recovery in case of disaster, but it is not technically necessary. It must be of type 0x83 "Linux native". If you are using lilo, your boot partition must be contained within the first 1024 cylinders of the drive. (Typically, the boot partition need only contain the kernel image.) Is this still valid in GRUB, esp in Fedora 10?
I have a Dell Inspiron 1721. Recently I replaced Windows Vista Home Edition (32 bit) with Slackware Linux 13.
Lilo wouldn't work, when I turned on the computer it printed "Li" and then 20 lines of 090909... and then the computer would hang up. So I just used my Slackware-boot-flashdrive-thing that I created during installation to boot my computer and told myself that I would fix it later.
Also, when I installed, cfdisk (or it might have been sfdisk) complained that /dev/sda did not contain a valid MS-DOS partition table. fdisk still worked, so I used it to create a new table, and cfdisk worked fine and the installation went along normally.
I reinstalled Slackware about two days later (I realized that I had installed the 32 bit version instead of the 64 bit). Lilo still didn't work.
I thought it might be something wrong with the Slackware DVD, so I downloaded and attempted to install about 4 different distributions. None of the CDs would work. The computer would start up, Linux would start to load, and the computer would freeze.
Xubuntu was the only distro I had that I could get to install. Halfway through the installation, (Surprise!) I got an error, something like "Package Grub failed to install, you will not be able to boot your new operating system".
The rest of the install went fine, so I restarted my computer and tried to use another one of my CDs to boot Xubuntu. I got the error "/dev/sda does not contain a valid partition table", and later "ext4-fs: checksum failed on dev sda at sector...", and "please specify a valid partition for root=". I am absolutely positive that I entered the correct partition, I triple checked and entered other partition names to make sure.
I'd also like to add that the computer makes horrible crunching noises when it starts up and when I do stuff like press keys. So is something seriously wrong with my hardware, or is there another explanation for all of this? Because I really don't want to have to try to repair the computer and can't pay to have it repaired.
I'm fairly new to Linux so I'm going to need a step-by-step guide to get me out of this rut. The install of Linux was fine but when I booted up I got this error. VFS: Cannot open root device "302" or unknown-block (3,2) append a correct "root=" boot option;here are the available partitions;
0800 78150744 sda driver:sd 0801 47428608 sda1 <-- this is my Windows partition 0802 30719552 sda2 <-- this is my Linux partition 0b00 1048575 sr0 driver:sr 0b01 1048575 sr1 driver:sr
Kernel panic - not syncing:VFS:Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block (3,2) I guessed from reading this error Lilo isn't pointing to the right partition to boot from? How will I fix this? I read another thread about boot problems on these forums and a guy said to do this:
#mkdir /slacktemp #mount /dev/device /slacktemp #chroot /slacktemp #cd /slacktemp/etc <-- for me it told me that doesn't exist #vi lilo.conf <-- couldn't do nothing and was frozen #lilo -v -t -b /dev/device #lilo -v -b /dev/device
The above solution did not work for me. Can anyone shed a light on a Linux rookie?
I am trying to boot linux kernel from a USB stick. I performed following steps:
1. wrote Grub stag1 to MBR of USB with this command on my linux host. dd if=/boot/grub/stage1 of=/dev/sdb1 bs=512 count=1
2. Mounted the USB and I copied the following files in my USB. boot/grub/stage1 boot/grub/stage2
3. Plugged in the USB in the the target machine. Rebooted and changed the booting sequence to boot from USB
My problem is that instead of getting a boot prompt, iIam getting GRUB GRUB GRUB all over the display. I googled out for it and found that if we change the auto-detection oh HDD in bios to manual that may solve the issue, but that did not help. If you happen to know that I am following the correct steps and in right order please point me how can I resolve this issue of GRUB.
i installed Rhel5 as dual boot with windows.after installation it worked nicely.i forgot to eject the installation dvd of rhel5 from the cdrom.while rebooting the installation menu appeared. so rebooted and eject the dvd.The problem is the GRUB loader not showing the boot menu(windows or Redhat).it shows grub>what sould i have to do, to boot
I'm triple booting (windows, ubuntu and osx86) at the moment but in order to load OSX86, I need to pass "cpus=1" to the kernel otherwise it won't load and the PC just reboots. Can I pass this argument from grub or do I have to install osx to a separate hdd and get grub to load the Darwin bootloader on the second hdd and then pass the argument?
I am having issues booting my LFS system on my hp nc8230 notebook running LFS SVN. Grub was built and installed per the book. My file system is almost as simple as it gets:
/dev/sda1 is swap /dev/sda2 is my LFS partition /
The LFS live cd still uses the now deprecated drivers for HDD's thus as far as the livecd is concerned my block devices is (hd0) and /dev/hda2 for the root respectively. However the kernel to be booted runs on the newer drivers thus on boot my block device should be referenced as /dev/sda2 for the root. Grub is in fact installed on the MBR what happens is right when my system boots I get a file not found error the grub CFG is pointing to the correct block device and root partition from what can be seen by looking at the grub.
I have FC8 on my laptop and then I wanted to test Ubuntu 8 so I installed Ubuntu and it removed the grub loader of Fedora then I repaired fedora with DVD and then it removed Ubuntu Grub. So how can I have two OS in one grub loader.I found grub.conf file in FC but couldnot find it in Ubuntu.
I've got new version of grub from the newest linux. Do you know how to disable quiet booting ? Because I've got problem with my graphics card and to fix it I need recovery mode.
