[ale] Re: ale Floppy Weirdness posting

[Cor van Dijk]

Hello, thanks for your response,
I solved the problem, although it it still somewhat unclear what caused
it. The main change I made was to do away with the "reiserfs" filesystem
and put everything on an "ext2" filesystem. This works fine for both a
floppy boot and a regular lilo boot on a hd sector. So now I have a quadruple
boot system, with one of them swappable. There may be other ways to do
it, but I put all of the kernels in one /boot partition (from a non-swappable
hd) and made a stanza for each of them in the "lilo.conf" file of that
same drive and run "/sbin/lilo" from there. It may be undesirable that
the global options in lilo.conf are the same for all of them, but so far,
all of them boot in my case. As to YaST, it makes worthless bootfloppies,
they hang on boot. I made a bootfloppy with "dd if=/cdrom/disks/bootdisk
of=/dev/fd0 bs=18k" (your suggestion, where "cdrom" is the first install
disk) and that one works fine this time (that is, on a complete "ext2"
filesystem), although it still asks for the location of the root partition,
it does not need the "Modules" floppy.
I became suspicious of the "reiserfs" system when my boot went bust
at the point where it had to mount the root partition.  What is so
great about "reiserfs" anyway? Cor.
Rafos701 at aol.com wrote:
Hello,
     
I get really exasperated at SuSE. Perhaps you can get a floppy without
all the menus in the images directory. Don't these dialogs allow you to
abort the modules? I skip loading them and it's only the module loading
that ceases, not the whole boot process.
     
Assuming you're attempting to get LILO to work on your drive, and you're
using some form of YaST which offers the option of installing lilo on the
root partition, I'd like to say that lilo won't write anything to the /boot
directory. The file which YaST writes for you, in the /etc directory, lilo.conf,
tells lilo a kernel, (the same thing written onto the floppy), is in /boot.
But what lilo writes is the same kind of stuff as is in your partition
table, code very close to the machine.
     
If by chance you left something else from the MS world, you can install
loadlin onto it, as without telling lilo how much memory you have in the
special parameters section, lilo hangs even when it installs
i.e.
"added  linux"
but look at your lilo.conf
file: At some point a line will say, "boot=/dev/hda" and if there is a
number after the a in hda, then you opted for installing lilo in your root
partition. If you delete the number lilo is installed hierarchially at
the top of your drive's organization.  (you have to run "lilo" after
exiting the editor with which you deleted the number.
     
I don't blame you for being unenthused with SuSE. But whatever system you
run will give you a long wait if you have to boot with the floppy. Another
thing you must watch is having a large enough swap space; the ale'er named
krum told me to use twice my ram in swap partition size, which used to
be enough for the whole installation. I dislike SuSE because if tries to
make user-friendly all kinds of things I used to be able to adjust by hand,
in an editor. This had to be, though because of the complexity, and RedHat
isn't that much different. If you want to have some assistance doing things,
though, that is to your benefit.