Can I use LILO with a USBDSL install?
Forum: USB booting
Topic: Can I use LILO with a USBDSL install?
started by: danowoz
Posted by danowoz on May 04 2005,04:00
I have successfully installed DSL and booted to my USB drive, with the USB boot disk. I was wandering if it is possable to set up LILO to choose between to OS's on the pen drive. What I would like to do is start from my floppy, then after the floppy detects the USB Pen drive, run LILO so I can choose between two or more OSs. If anyone has any insite on how this might be done I would apriciate your time. Thankyou
Posted by choekstr on May 04 2005,18:07
I am running grub on both my 1Gb lexar and my 5Gb seagate usb drives and it works great for loading multiple images/drives/paritions.I would say that you would need to be pretty familiar with booting concepts, grub and/or lilo, and already have a linux machine up and running for the lilo and/or grub installation tools.
With that said, conceptually, what I did was put the memory stick in my unix box, quick cat of /proc/scsi/scsi showed me my device name, and then I ran grub, ran setup within grub, and it installed it to the memory stick. I used the fedora version since it supports graphical boot splash patches, and now I have a pretty image, scrolling chooser and can choose multiple images and multiple ways to boot.
Extrapolate this to lilo, and you can have a similar setup where you can boot by typing whichever os/partition/drive you want.
Bring this back even further, regardless of which boot loader you use, lilo, grub, or syslinux/extlinux, booting to a floppy first, and then having that floppy point to another bootloader should work just fine. You would just need to work through the specifics of getting your preferred bootloader onto your memory stick.
Hope this helps,
Chris Hoekstra
Posted by danowoz on May 05 2005,01:52
Thanks for you reply. my question, "will this work?" has been anwerd. Thanks, now I just need to make it work 
I will keep you updated on my progress.... one again thanks for your info!