by Hello,
For all of you LILO sufferers out there, loadlin program is a very
convenient replacement for LILO - however it boots Linux from DOS
partitions. I wasn't able to get LILO to work on my machine - I have an
old BIOS with EZ-DISK running. At every boot, LILO would hang with a
"LI" message. I solved this problem once, but after I recently
recompiled the kernel and rebooted, the problem came back. I followed
an advise in this newsgroup and switched to loadlin, and it really
helped me out. It's easy to setup, use, and all you need is a kernel
image (like zImage). You could copy your kernel to the DOS partition
from Linux, or by using a program to read Linux partitions from DOS. I
used the latter option - ext2tools; you can also use lread. The major
advantage to me is that loadlin allows to boot Linux while keeping the
MBR intact. It also solves many LILO incompatibilities, including the
one I described above. Just like with LILO, you can pass boot
parameters to the kernel (i.e. mem=xxx)! If you use loadlin, you don't
need System.map file. In addition, loadlin is included on the RedHat CD
in the root directory under the name lodlin16.tgz. It's also available
from major Linux FTP sites and mirrors.
Well, this concludes my story. My goal was to raise awareness of
loadlin and of its benefits.
Also, I'd like to thank everybody who contributes their time and effort
to answering questions in these groups.
Happy Holidays to everyone!
- Slav Inger.