Thanks a bunch you guys. You cleared up a lot of issues and misconceptions I had. I thought that you could boot another kernel while another was running, although in hindsight, I don't know why I thought that as the current running kernel would alredy be in high memory and such...
Well, I found a good floppy and installed a syslinux image by hand and copied the proper kernel and initrd image over and it boots now. But I still have one problem. I am trying to boot the new stable 2.6.0 kernel and it say s some error and that I need to pass an init= option to the kernel. I've never gotten this before in 2.4 kernels. What is the init option and how should I use it? > "Jonathan Lassoff" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > >> I want to boot the debian woody install on the second drive, and have >> been >> with a boot floppy for a few months now. > [...] >> Well the original disk reprted all kinds of bad sectors while >> writing it, so I found a floppy that works, and it still fails to >> boot. > > How are you making the boot floppy? I'd probably try to do this sort > of thing by using a real bootloader... > >> So then I thought I might have my first go at using GRUB on the >> command line. So I boot into my Redhat 9 install and switch to >> single user mode (init 1) and run grub. I set the root partition and >> specify my kernel with all the right options. Then I specify my >> initrd image and then run "boot" and the thing just just quits, it >> doesn't boot or do anything. > > Well, yeah, you've already booted the machine, the command-line grub > isn't going to magically reboot your running kernel. You need to > install grub on to some media (your hard disk or your known-good > floppy) and boot from that, then this incantation would work. Read > the GRUB manual. > > (I find a GRUB floppy to be a great rescue tool, BTW: if you have some > clue of what's on the machine, you can use it to boot even if your MBR > is broken, you can boot from partitions that the local boot loader > doesn't know about, and if your system is really hosed, you can > connect a null-modem cable to another machine, tell GRUB to use a > serial console, and start catting files from the GRUB prompt. Not > that I've had flaky hardware that requires this or anything. :-) > > ....so my recommendation would be to follow the procedure in the GRUB > manual, and make a GRUB floppy, and either use that to boot your > Debian partition or use it to install GRUB into your MBR. > > -- > David Maze [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/ > "Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal." > -- Abra Mitchell > > > -- > To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
