Need Slack help

[murakami]

I have 2 hardrives on my thinkpad, one is the internal primary drive seen as hda and another drive in a removable ultrabay 2000 caddy that I can swap with my CDROM. The second drive is seen as hdc.

I like to keep my OS's seperated, so I keep windows on hda and slack on hdc. In order to install slack, I stick it in the hda slot (primary driver) and do a normal install. I boot it to check and see if it installed properly.

After I do an install, I edit and run LILO, fstab, mtab, etc so that everything points to hdc instead of hda. I put the drive back into the ultrabay caddy and stick it back in. The thinkpad lets me choose which disk to boot from, but when I try booting from hdc, all I get is kernel panic. I can also boot from a floppy and specify the root is on hdc, this works. I've tried rewriting the MBR and all the usual LILO tricks, but I can't seem to make it boot from hdc only. Any suggestions on what to try next?

[Chris]

Re: Need Slack help

Originally posted by murakami
I have 2 hardrives on my thinkpad, one is the internal primary drive seen as hda and another drive in a removable ultrabay 2000 caddy that I can swap with my CDROM. The second drive is seen as hdc.

I like to keep my OS's seperated, so I keep windows on hda and slack on hdc. In order to install slack, I stick it in the hda slot (primary driver) and do a normal install. I boot it to check and see if it installed properly.

After I do an install, I edit and run LILO, fstab, mtab, etc so that everything points to hdc instead of hda. I put the drive back into the ultrabay caddy and stick it back in. The thinkpad lets me choose which disk to boot from, but when I try booting from hdc, all I get is kernel panic. I can also boot from a floppy and specify the root is on hdc, this works. I've tried rewriting the MBR and all the usual LILO tricks, but I can't seem to make it boot from hdc only. Any suggestions on what to try next?

I may be missing something here, but if you edit lilo.conf to point to hdc while the drive is still hda, lilo should give output errors and not update correctly when you run it.

[murakami]

Re: Re: Need Slack help

Originally posted by Chris
I may be missing something here, but if you edit lilo.conf to point to hdc while the drive is still hda, lilo should give output errors and not update correctly when you run it.

Yep, that's true, but I don't run lilo until the drive is in the hdc slot. I only get a warning that hdc is not the primary drive. when I run lilo.

[Chris]

Re: Re: Re: Need Slack help

Originally posted by murakami
Yep, that's true, but I don't run lilo until the drive is in the hdc slot. I only get a warning that hdc is not the primary drive. when I run lilo.

Ok...I only asked because that is not the order you said you did it in in your original post:

After I do an install, I edit and run LILO, fstab, mtab, etc so that everything points to hdc instead of hda. I put the drive back into the ultrabay caddy and stick it back in.

[murakami]

Re: Re: Re: Re: Need Slack help

Originally posted by Chris
Ok...I only asked because that is not the order you said you did it in in your original post:

That's OK, I've tried getting this running so many ways that I've run out of easy ideas. I think I'll try a network install with the slack hard drive in hdc.

[converge]

No specific ideas here, although you may want to consider windows as the secondary drive and linux as your primary, as it may be more forgiving in a sense... with lilo being indifferent to which drive is which

[murakami]

Originally posted by c0nv3r9
No specific ideas here, although you may want to consider windows as the secondary drive and linux as your primary, as it may be more forgiving in a sense... with lilo being indifferent to which drive is which

Yeah, I though about that also, which is an OK solution - but this was so easy in RH8

[blackwave]

growing pains...

Originally posted by murakami
but this was so easy in RH8

You know, I'd love to buy a t-shirt that had that quoted under the Slackware logo...

[murakami]

Re: growing pains...

Originally posted by blackwave
You know, I'd love to buy a t-shirt that had that quoted under the Slackware logo...

While there are many things I like about slack, and many things that annoy me in RH - this was a no brainer in RH8. I just swapped out the drives and RH adjusted to it. It used GRUB as the boot loader, so that might have something to do with it, but I haven't really investigated further. As long as I'm doing a normal install, slack has been very easy to get up and running.