On Sat, Oct 17, 1998 at 09:49:54AM -0400, Michael Stone wrote: > Quoting Tom Lees ([EMAIL PROTECTED]): > > While I'm at it, *PLEASE* drop the dependency of lilo on mbr. I don't want > > a new mbr eg if I want to install LILO to use on a floppy ONLY (I use > > GRUB on my HD). Change it to Recommends. mbr being a high priority and/or > > essential (can't remember if it is) should be enough. > > Can someone explain what the point of mbr is? Why not just install lilo > directly to the mbr? (I always go back and do this for security reasons > anyway: I've disabled floppy boot in the bios, why do I want an mbr > that re-enables it?)
Wow! Maybe I'm an idiot, but I just _now_ (after literally years of wondering) realized where that silly 1FA: message was coming from. I had thought it was some kind of weird debugging feature of some BIOSes! 1FA looks like a hexadecimal number. I know MBR has to be small, but can we at least put in some commas, eg. "1,F,A:" ? Furthermore, I think it should be made abundantly clear, somewhere obvious, that you have to set the active partition when you install Debian. I've always been a pure-LILO user, and LILO ignores the active setting. Not understanding mbr, I've always gone through on my Debian systems and changed lilo to use /dev/hda instead of /dev/hda1, because otherwise my system wouldn't boot automatically to Linux. I know it's my own sheer incompetence, but I would have appreciated a warning message about this somewhere. Have fun, Avery
