LILO mini-HOWTO: Booting from a Rescue Floppy

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## 8. Booting from a Rescue Floppy

Next, I installed Windows-95 on my office system. It blew away my nice Lilo MBR, but it left my Linux partitions alone. Kernels take a long time to load from floppy, so I made a floppy with a working Lilo setup on it, which could boot my kernel from the IDE.

I made the lilo floppy like so:

      fdformat /dev/fd0H1440      #  lay tracks on virgin diskette
      mkfs -t minix /dev/fd0 1440 #  make file system of type minix
      mount /dev/fd0 /mnt         #  mount in the standard tmp mount point
      cp -p /boot/chain.b /mnt    #  copy the chain loader over
      lilo -C /etc/lilo.flop      #  install Lilo and the map on the diskette.
      umount /mnt

Notice that the diskette must be mounted when you run the installer so that Lilo can write its map file properly.

This file is /etc/lilo.flop. It's almost the same as the last one:

    #  Makes a floppy that can boot kernels from HD.
    boot = /dev/fd0
    map = /mnt/lilo-map
    delay = 100
    ramdisk = 0
    timeout = 100
    prompt
    disk = /dev/hda     # 1 GB IDE, BIOS only sees first 500 MB.
       bios=0x80
       sectors = 63
       heads = 16
       cylinders = 2100
    image = /vmlinuz
      append = "hd=2100,16,63"
      root = /dev/hda2
      label = linux
      read-only
      vga = extended
    other = /dev/hda1
      label = msdos
      table = /dev/hda
      loader = /mnt/chain.b

Finally, I needed MS-DOS 6.2 on my office system, but I didn't want to touch the first drive. I added a SCSI controller and drive, made an msdos file system on it with Linux' mkdosfs, and Windows-95 sees it as "D:". But of course MSDOS will not boot off of D:. This is not a problem when you have Lilo. I added the following to the `lilo.conf` in Example 2.

    other = /dev/sda1
      label = d6.2
      table = /dev/sda
      loader = /boot/any_d.b

With this modification MSDOS-6.2 runs, and it thinks it is on C: and Windows-95 is on D:.

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