On Tue, 13 Nov 2001, Brent Harding wrote: > Wow, never thought of switching to boot linux from it's own > drive by loading lilo on it and switching the boot flag. Do I > really have to switch in the bios if I use two different > drives, as technically they have different partition tables and > will both be able to be set bootable. Well, much of this depends on the BIOS, and how current the hardware is. I have only got experience with the machines here. The machines I used to run would boot only from partitions marked boot active in the first drive, or maybe the second, and this was not controlled from the BIOS, but we are now seeing more flexibility through the BIOS, not only in booting from more drives, but in overcoming the 1024 cylinder limit, which is ridiculous with todays large hard drives. So your question really needs to be addressed by someone with wider experience, maybe on a hardware list. I just look to see what my stuff can do, and try things. Lilo issues a bunch of warnings if you try to do the extended stuff, since it may not be supported through your particular BIOS: make sure you have a tested, working boot floppy before you start experimenting, of course. Note that if you have already installed lilo on the MBR, you can only boot from there, unless you restore the original MBR. I'm not sure if the newer BIOSs can bypass that. As an aside, there is really no reason why the BIOS should have the braindead limititions that they have had in the past. In particular, their inaccessibility from other than a local monitor is a problem for lots of people, even with no disability. This is especially true in server (possibly farm) environments and for clusters, where monitors would be a nuisance, and a waste of money. For more on this see the section on the Open Source BIOS projects in LWN, at: http://lwn.net/2001/1018/devel.php3/ For these environments, serial and remote BIOS access is essential. I learned from the etherboot project that the way they debug a BIOS setup (for a NIC card), is to write the (locally customized) cookbook code to a floppy, and boot from that. Later, for production systems, they burn the very same code into the usual PROM chip, possibly sending it away to a company that does it for them. Of course, for a single personal system, you would probably just keep using the floppy. I'm guessing the Open BIOS projects do the same. Something to think about. -- L. C. Robinson reply to no_spam+munged_lcr@onewest.net.invalid People buy MicroShaft for compatibility, but get incompatibility and instability instead. This is award winning "innovation". Find out how MS holds your data hostage with "The *Lens*"; see "CyberSnare" at http://www.netaction.org/msoft/cybersnare.html