Mail Archives: opendos/2002/05/29/10:42:21
On Wed, May 29, 2002 at 02:46:23PM +1000, da Silva, Joe wrote:
> Firstly, I seem to recall someone here mentioning that LILO could be
> installed in
> either the MBR or the DOS boot sector. The LILO documentation also seems to
Yes, but we'd say MBR or the superblock of a Linux partition. I don't
think you can install LILO to a FAT partition. I did something similar
once (although it may have been NTFS; I don't remember) and it trashed
the filesystem.
> suggest this and that recent versions of LILO and Ontrack's DM were
> compatible.
Perhaps. I think it should work as Ben suggests. However, as long as you
plan to have DOS available, loadlin.exe is much easier to work with. It
has the considerable advantage of being configurable (such as it is ...
you don't need to configure it at all if you just run it from the DOS
command line) under absolutely any OS imaginable.
There's a new version of loadlin just released, 1.6c. This finally fixed
the long-time limitation of kernel size. It's too new to be included in
any distro, so you'd have to look up the site at freshmeat.net. I know
that Slackware's pending release has a .tgz of loadlin. You can get it
here: (watch for word wrap if your mail client does it)
ftp://ftp.eunet.be/pub/slackware/slackware-current/slackware/a/loadlin-1.6c-i386-1.tgz
I used to have loadlin configured in a config.sys multi-boot menu (with
MS-DOS, but I know DR-DOS can do that too.) Here's how the Linux boot
looked:
shell=[drive:][\path-to\]loadlin.exe [drive:][\path-to\]kernel.img [Linux_boot_parameters]
You want to load this with no memory management, as clean a DOS
environment as you can possibly get. YMMV -- I've heard that some have
had to use memory management in the past, but that was before the new
loadlin release.
In case you didn't figure it out, "kernel.img" would be the filename of
your Linux kernel image file. Most distros AFAIK install theirs as
/vmlinuz or /boot/vmlinuz. You need to copy that onto your DOS
filesystem. Put it anywhere you like.
If you edit your DOS config.sys under Linux, you have to watch for the
DOS vs. UNIX text format. There are numerous ways to take care of this
little problem.
> Back to the topic of LILO, one thing that annoys me is that when it writes
> it's boot menu (which looks OK), it then writes a garbled boot selection
> prompt, awaiting selection of the menu choice. I can't figure out why the
> boot selection prompt message is garbled. I'm not 100% sure where it gets
I don't know either. I think it's ANSI. What distribution is this? I use
a text LILO prompt, myself, but IIRC I had to substitute some parameter
in /etc/lilo.conf, or make /boot/boot.b a symlink to boot-text.b.
> format that I can view. Any idea how to fix this annoying little problem?
Again I'd recommend loadlin. It's just as fast as LILO and *far* more
convenient.
> Finally, while I can access the DOS partitions from Linux, what should
> I use to access the Linux partition from DOS?
I don't know if there's a DOS equivalent, but there's "explore2fs" for
Windows.
What I'd suggest is that you set up dosemu to make your life easier. You
can do quite a bit of DOS through dosemu. What I liked about it was
having a DOS console with other than standard VGA 80x25 text mode. Try
out your "xtree" in a 128x48 framebuffer console -- it would be almost
as good as "mc" under Linux. ;) :)
HTH, let me know if you need more information.
Rob - /dev/rob0
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