I have a situation where I was forced to insert my bootdisks with softraid-1 root to another machine for repairing, and need to reinstall lilo on that disks. If that will be just one disk w/o raid, my steps will be to create temporary lilo.conf with entries like this: disk=/dev/sdc bios=0x80 boot=/dev/sdc ... and all will be just fine, installed this way lilo will boot when sdc becomes sda on original machine. So far, so good. Now I have things complicated by raid: boot=/dev/md1 # set up on /dev/sdc1 and /dev/sdd1 disk=/dev/sdc bios=0x80 disk=/dev/sdd bios=0x81 ... When I run lilo with this config, it complains: ------ # lilo -v -v -t -r /x -C /etc/lilo.conf.tmp LILO version 21.4-4 (test mode), Copyright (C) 1992-1998 Werner Almesberger 'lba32' extensions Copyright (C) 1999,2000 John Coffman boot = /dev/sdc, map = /boot/map.0821 Reading boot sector from /dev/sdc Merging with /boot/boot.b Secondary loader: 11 sectors. Boot image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.2.16-22 Setup length is 7 sectors. Mapped 1228 sectors. Mapping RAM disk /boot/initrd-2.2.16-22 RAM disk: 974 sectors. Added linux * Map file size: 15360 bytes. The boot sector and the map file have *NOT* been altered. Fatal: Duplicate geometry definition for /dev/sdc ------ I really don't know if /dev/sdc is bootable after this (yes I know about test mode, -t ;), but /dev/sdd definitely is _not_ bootable. Maybe I'm just wrong or don't understand what I need to specify here. All other options leads to the same results: disk=/dev/sdc bios=0x80 # w/o /dev/sdd disk=/dev/md1 bios=0x80 disk=/dev/sdc bios=0x80 disk=/dev/sdd bios=0x80 # the same for both ... (that are one-lines that I tried -- only one line was actually present in config). It won't work without bios= also -- when I try to boot from such a disk, lilo will execute endless loop displaying some hexadecimal digits. This was with lilo-21.4.4-10 (from 7.0 release) and some earlier releases of 21.4.4.
This seems to be better in current releases