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Booting a foreign operating system

LILO can even boot other operating systems, i.e. MS-DOS. To boot an other operating system, the name of a loader program, the device or file that contains the boot sector and the device that contains the partition table have to be specified.

The boot sector is merged with the partition table and stored in the map file.

Currently, the loaders chain.b, os2_d.b, any_b.b and any_d.b exist. chain.b simply starts the specified boot sector.gif os2_d.b can boot OS/2 from the second hard disk. any_b.b and any_d.b install resident drivers that swap the first and the second floppy or hard disk drive. They can boot any operating system from the second hard disk, if it uses only the BIOS. This is known to work for PC/MS-DOS.

The image is specified as follows: other= device_name or other= file_name

The following additional variables are recognized: loader, table and unsafe.

loader= chain_loader
specifies the chain loader that should be used. If it is omitted, /boot/chain.b is used. The chain loader must be specified if booting from a device other than the first hard or floppy disk.
table= device
specifies the device that contains the partition table. LILO does not pass partition information to the booted operating system if this variable is omitted. (Some operating systems have other means to determine from which partition they have been booted. E.g. MS-DOS usually stores the geometry of the boot disk or partition in its boot sector.) Note that /sbin/lilo must be re-run if a partition table mapped referenced with table is modified.
unsafe
do not access the boot sector at map creation time. This disables some sanity checks, including a partition table check. If the boot sector is on a fixed-format floppy disk device, using unsafe avoids the need to put a readable disk into the drive when running the map installer. unsafe and table are mutually incompatible.

Example:

other = /dev/hda2
  label = os2
  table = /dev/hda



next up previous contents
Next: Disk geometry Up: Boot image types Previous: Booting kernel images



Ross Biro
Sat May 20 13:51:22 PDT 1995