I have successfully booted into windows but found some interesting behaviors along the way. It appears that I must have swapped the hard drives at some point. The latest OS resides on hda1. Using YaST2 I added another boot definition pointing to windows on hdb1. FYI...YaST behaves differently when launched from within X than when launched from a shell with no X. After rebooting I get the lilo prompt to select an OS. I select windows and am then presented another lilo prompt (SuSE 7.0?) to select an OS. After choosing windows a second time, windows is successfully launched. This accomplishes what I need...but it would be nice to understand what is happening so I could get rid of the second OS prompt. Obviously I have done several installs on my system onto different drives. I have read the man page for lilo.conf and understood only a fraction of what it was trying to tell me. Can someone point me to some other resources that will help me to understand what is happening during the boot process? Thanks
Mike,
You're almost home free. Take a gander at /etc/lilo.conf. You should see an entry in there for booting windows and a timeout value. You should be able to edit the file and install the changes by running lilo.
Try man lilo for help. If still stuck, post your lilo.conf file...
Michael Long wrote:
After rebooting I get the lilo prompt to select an OS. I select windows and am then presented another lilo prompt (SuSE 7.0?) to select an OS. After choosing windows a second time, windows is successfully launched.
This accomplishes what I need...but it would be nice to understand what is happening so I could get rid of the second OS prompt.
Take a look at /etc/lilo.conf I expect you will see a line message=/boot/message and, if you try to cat /boot/message you will see gibberish (i.e. it is not ASCII but code for that SuSE window.) If you comment out/delete that message= line and then run lilo you should no longer see the SuSE stuff, If you wish, you can now add a line message=/boot/mymessage where mymessage is just a text file to echo whatever reminders you want at boot time. For example, I have used lines like for linux type l for windows type w (where my lilo.conf has lines label=l and label=w to match; I am lazy and like to type just one letter). Alternatively, you have no message= line and just use tab to list the options. doug
After rebooting I get the lilo prompt to select an OS. I select windows and am then presented another lilo prompt (SuSE 7.0?) to select an OS. After choosing windows a second time, windows is successfully launched.
This accomplishes what I need...but it would be nice to understand what is happening so I could get rid of the second OS prompt. Obviously I have done several installs on my system onto different drives. I have read the man page for lilo.conf and understood only a fraction of what it was trying to tell me. Can someone point me to some other resources that will help me to understand what is happening during the boot process?
What it sounds like to me is that there's two installations of SuSE on that machine, possibly. I use a similar setup due to laziness myself, where I have Lilo running on the Master Boot Record for /dev/hda, controlling which actual partition gets booted, then I have a bootloader like grub or lilo set up on each individual partition to boot that partition's OS. This enables me to run one disk sharing Debian and Win2K, and a second disk running Red Hat 8.0 (hdb1), SuSE 8.1 (coming soon to hdb2), and Gentoo (coming soon to hdb3). If you select Linux from the second boot menu that you get to, is it the same install that you have running now, or a different one? Either way though, it's basically a situation where there's one boot loader per hard drive that's causing it to happen. You could probably, with a little tinkering, get that second menu to go away by setting Windows to the default option and setting timer to 0, but it's probably not worth the effort.
participants (3)
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doug waud -
George Metz -
Michael Long