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4. Moving LILO configuration files

Sometimes, one must play with LilO's configuration file. The good news is that, first, they are movable, second, you can tell Linuxconf about it. Just go to the "List all configuration files" menu, scroll to the /etc/lilo.conf line and select the edit button. Enter the new path of the LILO configuration file. Be aware that LILO expect to find its configuration file in /etc/lilo.conf. When moving the file, it has to go to a subdirectory holding a etc subdirectory in which you will place the file lilo.conf, for example, /mnt/tmp/etc/lilo.conf.

4.1 Why move LILO anyway?

There are different reason why one would want to do this. Here are some.

On the other hand, some distributions properly install all the files needed for booting in a /boot directory, which is kept in a separate partition if your root directory is not entirely below the 1024 cylinder mark. In that case, you are not likely to need to move LILO at all.

4.2 How to move? Where?

On a machine dedicated to Linux, where you have a large drive with more than 1024 cylinders, many people will create a smaller partition for the basic OS and a larger for the data, insuring that all LILO file fits under the 1024 cylinder limit.

This is often annoying as it makes management more complex. You end up with two partition partly filled.

Another solution is to create a very small partition (few megs) at the beginning of the disk and reserve that for LILO configuration and kernel files. This way you can create a single large root partition which is nicer to manage.

(one can argue that creating a single large partition is a bad idea as it puts all the eggs in the same bag. Given the design of the EXT2 file system which distribute management information all over the partition, with replication, I doubt this apply anymore).

So you have a partition which fits the bill. It is all accessible from the BIOS. Here are the steps to follow. Suppose this partition in mount under the lilo directory and you want to put all configuration files in the root of this partition.

You can activate this moved configuration like this

        /sbin/lilo -r /lilo
        

And you can do this with Linuxconf by telling the /etc/lilo.conf is now /lilo/etc/lilo.conf. From now on, using Linuxconf, this should be completely invisible to you or whoever manage your machine.


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