I've had bad experiences in upgrading to new releases. I know that it's my fault, due to poor hardware/mobo choices, but I've had lousy luck with every R5a release I've attempted.

While R4V5 is working fine (perfectly!) for me right now, R5A22 has released to rave reviews. I'm a tinkerer. I've got to try it out.

So...

I got it in my head that I could create a "testing" root partition. My default boot system now looks like this:


(I moved /cache from /dev/hda3 to /myth to allow the use of /dev/hda3 as my alternate, testing root partition.)

I then mounted /dev/hda3, mirrored /dev/hda1 to /dev/hda3 via rsync, and edited lilo.conf to allow for a second boot option:



I've also modified /dev/hda3/etc/fstab to mount /dev/hda3 at /

I then issue and reboot. The lilo selection menu comes up, I select mirror, and it boots. but...

No matter what I try, I can't get the system to boot up with /dev/hda3 mounted as /

Am I overlooking something simple in my attempt to boot from /dev/hda3?

And perhaps more importantly - if I do succeed in my quest, will I be able to install R5A22 to /dev/hda3 for testing, while retaining the ability to boot R4V5 off /dev/hda1 if things don't work out?

_________________
R5Fxx

Home-Brewed Mythic Dragon Clone
200GB WD IDE /myth
2x250GB WD IDE (lvm) /myth/tv

I'll have a crack at this soon and post my findings

"/dev/vg/myth" mounted on /myth/tv

whats that all about?

I added two 250 GB drives, used LVM to create a 500GB volume group, then mounted the vg at /myth/tv. My original 200GB drive has a 180 GB hda4 partition, mounted at /myth (the default.)

This gives me 180 GB for video storage - I also use this partition as the incremental backup device for the other computers in my house (/myth/backup). I've also now got a HUGE storage device for the livetv cache (/myth/cache) -- not that I'd ever need that much cache.

I've got some more detailed diagnostics in another post in this forum http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=6806&highlight=

Note that with the modifications I've done, everything still works -- that is, nothing's broken. My original intent, dual boot, just isn't happening.

_________________
R5Fxx

Home-Brewed Mythic Dragon Clone
200GB WD IDE /myth
2x250GB WD IDE (lvm) /myth/tv

I THINK the problem can be that your machine boots using initrd.

I'll admit that I don't know enough about the boot process to understand what initrd is or does. I'll even admit that I've researched it (at http://www.tldp.org/LDP/Linux-Filesystem-Hierarchy/html/initrd.html for example) and I still have no clue what initrd does. I can read the words, it simply makes no sense to me.

Are you sating that there could be something hard-coded in KnoppMyth's initrd that I need to change (create a new initrd) to allow mount of root at hda3?

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[edit]
I just did some poking around in initrd, which is still mounted. Everything in /initrd/etc looks clean -- there's no mention of hda1 or root in there.

However...

/initrd/linuxrc contains:



So... if I create another initrd, modify this file to refer to hda3, then specify this file in lilo.conf, I could have this licked. Does that look right to you?


Found instructions for building initrd: http://www.faqs.org/docs/evms/x3834.html

_________________
R5Fxx

Home-Brewed Mythic Dragon Clone
200GB WD IDE /myth
2x250GB WD IDE (lvm) /myth/tv

Think of it as a virtual floppy disk to load drivers from or maybe as the kernel's "backpack". Booting is done at a very, very low level with a very small amount of code. The only disk access available asking the BIOS to read specific disk blocks into memory. Thus if you need anything that isn't built into the kernel image (like modules) you need to have a "RAM disk" image that contains it, which can be loaded by the same low level mechanism. There are too many reasons for not building the drivers directly into the kernel to go into here. It's better to have a mechanism which lets you pack the things you'll need in a seperate bundle. Part of what running lilo does is to generate the appropriate list of blocks for the kernel and RAM disk. However all of those blocks need to be in the same partition (You can't grab your backpack to get your bus pass if it's across town).

If initrd is the problem, you could try removing "initrd=/boot/initrd.gz" from the mirror section in ur lilo.conf.

Or would you need to recompile the kernel without the ramdisk aswell?

I just dug back through my old multi-boot setups. With /dev/hda1 as / Set up a permanent mount for /dev/hda3 on /mirror in your /etc/fstab like this:

fix your lilo.conf to look like this:

Then run lilo. You should now be able to boot to the alternate image. Once you can do that, do the reverse setup. The /etc/fstab on hda3 should mount hda1 as mirror and the lilo.conf should have the files for hda1 labelled Linux coming from there, as shown here:


Note that you do not need to run lilo again this setup is for the future when you may need to run lilo from this image.
BTW - As they were your labels were going to get confusing, so I'd recommend calling them "hda1-Linux" and "hda3-Linux" as shown above instead of "Linux" and "mirror".

Thanks for taking the time to lay all of this out.

I'll have time this weekend to give it a go - I'll post back with my findings.

_________________
R5Fxx

Home-Brewed Mythic Dragon Clone
200GB WD IDE /myth
2x250GB WD IDE (lvm) /myth/tv