Quote:
Originally Posted by waddles
Yes it is automounting but they do not show up in fstab. Shouldn't they? They aren't in mtab either. I had thought that mounting a file is supposed to show up in fstab but maybe that is only devices.
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The "/etc/fstab" file tells Linux what to mount when Linux starts up. So, "fstab" only contains what you have put there using the editor. Think of "fstab" as the list of things that are to be automatically and permanently mounted. You might find it less confusing to add your flash disks to "/etc/fstab" in Slackware, since they will always be mounted on every boot.
This is the most accurate way to see what is actually mounted at any point in time.
The "proc" directory is a file-system with "live" information. In some cases (write protected root file-system) the "/etc/mtab" information may be incorrect.
Quote:
Originally Posted by waddles
When I rebooted into Mint I got:
Loading Mint
Error 0x01
boot Mint
and it hung there.
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That error (0x01) usually means that the BIOS could not access the disk drive. In your case, the flash drive was not detected by the BIOS on boot, or the BIOS drive ID for the flash disk changed after you ran "lilo".
Does your BIOS always detect the flash drive? Does the BIOS always put the flash drive in the same place in the list of boot devices? If you don't plug or unplug flash drives or hard disks, your BIOS should assign the BIOS drive IDs the same way every time that you boot. Do not plug or unplug disks between using "lilo" and trying to boot.
I get the impression that you might have two flash drives. Is that correct? If you do have two flash drives then be careful not to switch where they are plugged in between running "lilo" and trying to boot.
If your flash drive appears as two different devices it might be a U3 flash drive that appears as both a CD and a disk drive. LILO cannot load a file from a CD, and will not boot from an operating system in the CD device of a U3 flash. Older SanDisk Cruzer flash drives are likely to be U3.
You can tell if your USB drive was mounted as a CD. When you use "cat /proc/mounts" you will see something like this.
Code:
/dev/sdd /media/disk1 iso9660 ro,relatime 0 0
The important thing to look for is "iso9660". LILO can't load an operating system from the "iso9660" file-system on a CD-ROM because the BIOS does not assign a BIOS disk ID to a CD-ROM. The same is true for any other kind of optical disk, CD, DVD, etc.
If you look in your BIOS, a U3 flash drive will appear as another CD or DVD drive in the list of boot devices. It will also appear as a hard disk in the list of boot devices.
A "normal" flash drive will be detected as one hard disk device. The partitions should all have the same device name with a different partition number on the end. For example "/dev/sdd" for the disk, with "/dev/sdd1" and "/dev/sdd5" for partitions. The BIOS should show that as only a single hard disk added to the boot devices. If you choose the flash disk as a boot device then the BIOS will load the MBR from the flash disk.
It will be less confusing if you focus on one problem at a time, and then do only the things suggested to fix that one problem. When you change other things and post additional problems it is hard to follow exactly what you are trying to do at the moment.
My suggestion is to choose either Ubuntu or Mint, and then try to get these things to work for that one OS.
- Mount the flash partition for the other OS
- Use "cat /proc/mounts" to check for the flash partition being mounted
- Use "ls /path.../vmlinuz" to check for the file used in "lilo.conf". Replace "path..." with the actual path.
- Install LILO using Slackware
- Do not change BIOS settings. Do not plug or unplug USB devices.
- Boot from the other Linux OS using Slackware LILO
To do that you choose the Slackware hard disk as the boot device in the BIOS. In other words, don't change the default boot device in the BIOS.
Decide how you are going to mount the flash disk when you run "lilo". Are you going to type in a mount command, or are you going to add the flash disk to "/etc/fstab" in Slackware? Be consistent and always mount the flash disk the same way. Otherwise, nobody can be sure what file name should be in "lilo.conf".
You may not be aware of this, but when you click on the flash disk in the graphical desktop, that can automatically mount the partition. Depending on which account you use and which order you click on the partitions they may not always have the same name. To avoid confusion you should either use "fstab" or manually mount the partitions. Create your own mount points and then mount the partitions using those mount points. For example you can use "/ubuntu" or "/mint" for a mount point. Create empty directories for mount points. Then your file names will always be the same. For example: "/ubuntu/boot/vmlinuz" or "/mint/boot/vmlinuz".
Since you are going to try to get one other OS to load, you should only have to mount one partition before running "lilo".