[techtalk] Looks like I goofed

[Harald Welte]

On Fri, Sep 08, 2000 at 02:28:46AM -0400, arussello wrote:
> 
> Alright, I kinda messed up.
> 
> I just installed Linux Mandrake 7.1 on a brand new computer I just
> assembled, that all went fine.  Unfortunately, Mandrake installs something
> called grub, which I guessed allowed me to select different partitions to
> boot into.  I extremely disliked grub.

well.. most people are switching from lilo to grub, because grub has much
more features :)

> So,  then I figured I would just remove The Linux partition from the grub
> booter as well,  thinking that if there was only one partition, then no
> problem.  Problem.

You cannot just remove all partitions from your boot loader :) this has
to result in problems :)
> 
> The first reboot my system came up with a line that just read "grub>" and
> expected me to enter something I don't know.  So I rebooted with my Linux
> boot disk in the floppy drive, and it booted fine,  no grub either,  just
> right into Lilo.  I tried to repair Lilo, since my /boot drive is hda1 and
> the / drive is hda5 I told Lilo to boot right into hda5.  Which I assume
> is right.

yes. you have to specify your "/" directory as partition in lilo.conf.
So if You did it as You've described, it _should_ work

> Now the system boots, but then cackstrying to load init.  I comes up with
> a kernel panic saying that the init argument can't be found (I think that
> was the error message.  Now I can only boot this Linux machine with my
> bootdisk, which I extremely dislike.

This sounds like the kernel is unable to start init. And this again sounds
like it has mounted the wrong partition as root. And this again implies
that You probably specified the wrong partition in lilo.

> The basic moral of this story is live with grub, it's not doing any harm.

as I already said, most in-depth linux people are complaining about lilo and 
switch to grub, because it is able to read the filesystem, etc.

> The basic question I have is how do I make this work again?

You have to specify the partition which has /sbin/init on it as root=
in lilo.conf.

-- 
Live long and prosper
- Harald Welte / laforge at gnumonks.org                http://www.gnumonks.org
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