[olug] howto boot multiple linux partitions?

[Brian Wiese]

I hope someone at least on the list has tried this before, I'm in need of
some guidance... multiboot still confuses me...

I have Windoze (hda1) and Knoppix (hda6) installed on my laptop and am
booting with LILO installed to the mbr (hda).  From /etc/lilo.conf

boot=/dev/hda
root=/dev/hda6
...

I have another spare extended partition (hda7) that I would like to
install another gnu/linux distro onto (SuSE or Gentoo), and of course
still be able to boot my other two OSs.

fdisk -l shows: hda1, hda6, hda7 all set with the "Boot" flag
(were set using cfdisk, and again using fdisk -- but doesn't seem to
modify the partition, the first sector of hda7 is all 0's?)

I tried an install of SuSE (hda7) the other day, and told it not to
overwrite my mbr, and so I went into Knoppix to change my /etc/lilo.conf
to give me a boot option to boot that parition with:

other=/dev/hda7
  label="SuSE"

I run /sbin/lilo to save changes (and this gets re-written to the mbr?),
but it errors out with:

Fatal: First sector of /dev/hda7 doesn't have a valid boot signature.

So how do I do this?  I have hda7 toggled as bootable in fdisk, but the
error is correct, my first sector of /dev/hda7 is all zeros. 
(dd if=/dev/hda7 of=hda7.s1 bs=512 count=1)

I also notice that even though hda2 is not bootable (simple FAT32 data
paritition), it has some boot signature text on its first sector saying
"its not a bootable parition".  So all these windows partitions can still
'boot' and lilo doesn't have problems, how can I make multiple paritions
boot linux?

-- 
Brian Wiese          "What we do in life, echoes in eternity."
bwiese(at)cotse.com  gpg: 0x2FD6AF16    keyserver: pgp.dtype.org
phone: 402.932.5490  aim: unolinuxguru  www.unomaha.edu/~bwiese
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