Gentoo installation Update: DONE

**Dillinger** · 07-21-2003

I took out the initrd part from the lilo.conf and the option still never showed up. I'm starting to think I know why I'm having such a hard time. I never made a boot partition because I thought I didn't need it because madrake never made one for itself. Madrake set it up really strange, the first 6 gb of the drive is /, theres a swap partition right after it and then a partition for /home. Maybe I should just get rid of Mandrake completely by copying whatever I want to save from my home directory into a folder on the / drive, deleting the current /home partition, making a new /home partition further down the disk, putting the stuff I wanted to save BACK onto the new home partition, then during the gentoo install get rid of the current /, and swap partitions and making a new set of /boot, /swap and /root in that order on the front of the drive. I know it sounds a little weird, but would doing something like that make this work a lot easier? Then I could have a /boot partition at the beggining of the disk and then a /swap and / parition following it like normal. I have no desire to keep mandrake once I get gentoo installed anyway...

**Dolda2000** · 07-21-2003

Did you run "lilo" after changing your lilo.conf?

**Dillinger** · 07-21-2003

No, I just did and it gave an error regarding gentoo saying /boot/bzImage: no such file or directory. I just mounted the gentoo partition and there iz bzImage there, it must not be reading it properly.

**Dolda2000** · 07-21-2003

That's not it. In lilo.conf, you must the filename the LILO shall use to refer to the file, and obviously, you don't have Gentoo's bzImage in your Mdk /boot directory. Either copy it there, or mount /mnt/gentoo/boot and change lilo.conf to refer to /mnt/gentoo/boot/bzImage instead.

**Dillinger** · 07-21-2003

In the gentoo /boot there only appears to be 3 files, in the Mandrake /boot there are many more. Does this mean the Gentoo install didn't install files in the /boot properly?

I just ran Lilo again and it said it added all the existing options including Gentoo, but then said no images have been defined or default images do not exist. So basically Lilo can only take things from one location?

**Dolda2000** · 07-21-2003

I'm pretty sure that LILO can take stuff from several places. What changes did you make?

**Dillinger** · 07-21-2003

Basically I did like you said and copied bzImage into the Mandrake /boot directory, thats about it. When I rebooted again "Gentoo" still didn't appear in the menu. My lilo.conf section for Gentoo still looks like this:

Code:

image=/boot/bzImage
	label="Gentoo"
	root=/dev/hdb3
	append="devfs=mount hdc=ide-scsi acpi=off quiet"
	read-only

And heres the fstab I made for gentoo:

Code:

# <fs>			<mount point>		<type>		<opts>		<dump/pass>

/dev/hdb3		/boot			ext3		noatime		0 1
/dev/hdb3		/			ext3		noatime		0 1
/dev/hbd5		none			swap		sw		0 0
/dev/cdroms/cdrom0	/mnt/cdrom		iso9660		noauto,ro	0 0
/dev/dcroms/cdrom1	/mnt/cdrom2		iso9660		noauto,ro       0 0
proc			/proc			proc		defaults	0 0

I'm still thinking the install didnt go right for the /boot directory, the only files in there are boot, bzImage and f...

**Dolda2000** · 07-21-2003

Originally Posted by SiezedPropaganda

Basically I did like you said and copied bzImage into the Mandrake /boot directory, thats about it.

Did you rerun LILO?

Dont worry about /boot. It's not supposed to be anything in it but what you put there.

**Dillinger** · 07-21-2003

Yes I reran lilo and it gave me this message:

Added Mandrake
Added linux-nonfb
Added failsafe
Added Gentoo
Added windows
Fatal: No images have been defined or default image doesn't exist.

When I restarted there was no Gentoo option on the lilo screen. So how exactly does all this stuff work. Does the bootloader just lay it all out and when you select it the boot process comes from wherever you told the bootloader to take it from? I think I read something about lilo not being able to take anything from past the 1024th cyllinder on the drive, is that why it's not showing up?

**Dolda2000** · 07-21-2003

What you have heard about the 1024th cylinder only applies to older BIOSes which don't support LBA.
When you run lilo command, it gathers all the block lists of all kernels, and compiles the second stage boot loader. It then gets the block list of that, and integrates that with the first stage loader, which it then writes to the MBR.
GRUB doesn't need to have any precompiled information, so you just might have more luck if you install it instead of LILO.

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