Re: [9fans] booting plan 9 from LILO (was matrox ...)

[Tomas <psycho@pobox.com>]

On Sat, 4 May 2002 at 1:35pm, Russ Cox wrote:

> > 2.  I installed plan9 on the 2nd partition of my secondary
> > master (/dev/hdc2 on linux). I made an 'other' entry in
> > lilo.conf and run lilo. When I try to boot to plan9, I get an
> > error that the disk is not a bootable. So what could be going
> > wrong here?
>
> I suspect the problem is that Plan 9 doesn't know how to boot
> from anything but the primary master.  More precisely, I don't
> know how that would work and so I'm not surprised that it
> doesn't.
>
> It could be that we're not dealing with LILO properly at all,
> although I think some people have gotten it working.  I would
> try it myself on my laptop but I'm afraid to wipe my MBR, since
> I'm not 100% sure how to put the Windows 2000 one back.
>
> Anyone want to share LILO success stories?

Yes. I installed r3 a few weeks ago on my second primary
partition. Booting Plan 9 from lilo works without problems, with

other=/dev/hda2
        label=plan9
        table=/dev/hda

in /etc/lilo.conf

I did however run into troubles. Since it's a while ago, I can't
remember exactly how I did things, but I know I partitioned the
drive using Linux's cfdisk and marked the partition as being of
type Plan 9. Then I let the Plan 9 install procedure format the
partition, and all of a sudden there's something wrong with my
partitions. Linux's cfdisk now refuses to start up ("FATAL ERROR:
Bad primary partition 2: Partition ends after end-of-disk"), and
this is what Linux's fdisk tells me:

Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 4111 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *         1       255   2048256    b  Win95 FAT32
/dev/hda2           256       510   2048287+  39  Plan 9
/dev/hda3           511      4112  28931047    f  Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda5           511      4111  28925001    b  Win95 FAT32

I'm blaming Plan 9, since there was no problem with the
partitions before installing Plan 9. I haven't tried to do
anything about it yet, though, since I want to backup my system
before changing anything in the partition table.

I have since installed r4 on another machine, so I'll probably
just wipe the Plan 9 partition and use it for storing mp3s or
something.

/Tomas