Installing Salix in a multi-disk environment

[NickC]

I am trying to install Salix in a multi-disk environment. Problem is Lilo won't work when other disks get introduced to the system.

Originally with a single disk partitions are:

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/dev/sda1 - /boot
/dev/sda2 - /swap
/dev/sda3 - / root
/dev/sda4 - /home

LILO is written to to MBR of /dev/sda, lilo.conf:

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root=/dev/sda3

I now add another drive with the intention of changing the boot order in the BIOS to select which drive to boot from. Windows can handle this fine and all other drives boot. Problem is Salix will not boot because Lilo does not see the drives in the correct order as specified in the BIOS boot order.

I boot up from Knoppix and discover that my Salix drive has become /dev/sdc so I somehow need to change lilo to root=/dev/sdc3.

Is there any simple way of installing Salix so that it is not drive order dependent?

[NickC]

I have now addeda couple of disk drives and Salix will not boot. I boot into knoppix and find my Salix root is sdc3. I then boot from the Salix install CD and try and run by:

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huge.s root=/dev/sdc3 rdinit= ro

but still won't boot, what am I doing wrong?

Edit:
Now erros with

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/sbin/e2fsck: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while trying to open /dev/sda3
Could this be a zero-length partition

Why is this looking at /dev/sda3 when I have set root=/dev/sdc3?

[thenktor]

I now add another drive with the intention of changing the boot order in the BIOS to select which drive to boot from.

What for? Lilo and other boot managers can boot fine different systems from different disk. You just have to install it on the boot disk and create a working configuration. You can try lilosetup for this.

[NickC]

I now add another drive with the intention of changing the boot order in the BIOS to select which drive to boot from.

What for? Lilo and other boot managers can boot fine different systems from different disk. You just have to install it on the boot disk and create a working configuration. You can try lilosetup for this.

What for: because I now need to read data off these other drives.

I have a range of different OSs on different drives which regularly get inserted and/or removed depending upom what I need to do that day, a have an array of these in caddies for quick insertion/removal. I will not always have the same boot drive, hence the reason for writing lilo to the MBR of that particluar disk. In theory that should have let me boot into Salix simply by changing the boot drive in the BIOS.

Edit:
At the moment I can only boot Salix when that is the only drive in my system. As soon as I add more drives, in order to access data on them, Salix will not boot. Is there some sort of command prompt that I can use to reinstall lilo everytime I make a drive configuration change so that I can boot Salix again?

[thenktor]

If you change your drive setup you have to use UUIDs instead /dev/sdx names:
1. change everything in /etc/fstab
2. of course your boot disk still must hold the boot loader
3. the bootloader must tell the kernel where the root partition is by UUID, not by dev name

Maybe related info is in this thread: http://salixos.org/forum/viewtopic.php? ... hilit=uuid (I did not read it, but topic seemed to fit)

[NickC]

If you change your drive setup you have to use UUIDs instead /dev/sdx names:
1. change everything in /etc/fstab
2. of course your boot disk still must hold the boot loader
3. the bootloader must tell the kernel where the root partition is by UUID, not by dev name

Maybe related info is in this thread: http://salixos.org/forum/viewtopic.php? ... hilit=uuid (I did not read it, but topic seemed to fit)

Hmm. not too happy about trying to edit fstab, if something goes wrong I get stuck with a non-bootable system. As yet I haven't found anyway to boot into Salix to fix lilo that if it doesn't work for some reason.

What about instaling an alternative bootloader that supports multi-disk environments, if there are any.

[gapan]

Hmm. not too happy about trying to edit fstab, if something goes wrong I get stuck with a non-bootable system.

If you change the device names, you need to tell the system that you changed them. That's the only way to do it. Or you can use UUIDs instead, so device names/numbers don't matter, everything is recognized by its UUID. You still need to edit fstab to turn every entry into a UUID entry

As yet I haven't found anyway to boot into Salix to fix lilo that if it doesn't work for some reason.

You need to learn what a chroot is.

What about instaling an alternative bootloader that supports multi-disk environments, if there are any.

Your problem is not the bootloader. LILO and grub1/2 all happily can boot any multi-disk environment. I remember seeing a lilo setup that booted over 160 partitions spanned over dozens of drives something like 12 years ago. Your problem is that you're changing the device names. Either stop doing that, or use UUIDs instead of device names.

[NickC]

Just had a thought about creating an extra lilo entry for booting when I have the other disks in the system - /dev/sdc3. Unfortunately lilo will not let me create a spare entry like that, when I try to save it I get: Fatal: Illegal root= specification.

[Akuna]

If you can't access Salix anymore you could boot with SalixLive and execute LiloSetup who will setup UUIDs correctly for you and give you back access to all the OSs that are on your machine.

[NickC]

If you can't access Salix anymore you could boot with SalixLive and execute LiloSetup who will setup UUIDs correctly for you and give you back access to all the OSs that are on your machine.

Thats very interesting, are you saying that LiloSetup in SalixLive is different to the LiloSetup which ships with SalixInstallation CD? LiloSetup run from the SalixInstallation CD does not use uuid but, if I have understood correctly, you're saying that the LiloSetup which ships in SalixLive does use uuid. Have I got that correct?

Currently downloading SalixLive CD.