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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.
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: Disk geometry
Up: Boot image types
Previous: Booting kernel images
Ross Biro
Sat May 20 13:51:22 PDT 1995