[Nottingham] LILO dual boot - 2 Linuces on different drives - confused!

[Robert Postill]

David,

David Aldred wrote:
>
> How can I get the Ultima image on /dev/hdb1 loaded rather than the Mandriva 
> one on /dev/hda1/? 
>   
If I was to take a punt then I'd start with the idea that you're missing 
an initrd from the Ultima section.  initrd provides a mini filesystem 
with a bag of drivers inside.  Many distros don't like to inflate the 
kernel to an unmanageable size so they put most drivers inside an initrd 
(you can uncompress it with gzip and mount it with a command like  mount 
-t ext2 -o loop /boot/initrd-evms /mnt/initrd see 
http://www.faqs.org/docs/evms/x3834.html for some more info).  Often the 
initrd has slight differences between distros so unless you grab pretty 
much the entire thing and plonk it onto /dev/hda you'll be pretty much 
stuffed trying to mix two kernel images.  The kernel will be expecting 
an initrd in many cases so try and check out whether there's an initrd 
file on / or /boot. So I'd check /dev/hdb for initrd files (the names 
change from distro to distro).  Also check out 
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?t=370995, as that 
suggests if you're booting ext2 on IDE you should have that support 
already built into the kernel.  Have you installed on ext2?
Robert.