Trilight Zone

[thedark]

Before messing with your boot loader, please make sure that you have an emergency disk ready which enables you to boot your old system.

Unfortunately the Solaris install overwrites the master boot record (MBR) and overwrites your old boot manager.

Fortunately, the Solaris boot manager is able to chain-boot. For this to work you have to put your old boot loader (e.g. lilo) into the boot sector of one primary Linux partition.

For lilo this means: look at your /etc/lilo.conf. Look for the boot= line. If it is something like boot=/dev/hda1 everything is fine. But if it´s something like boot=/dev/hda it points to the MBR. Please change it to point to a primary Linux partition (e.g. boot=/dev/hda1)

A way to check if your boot-loader is chain-loadable is installing lilo in to the MBR and trying to chain load your other boot-manager. I used the following file called lilo.conf.mbr for this:


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#lilo.conf.mbr
#Lilo in Master Boot Record doing nothing but chain-loading another lilo
boot=/dev/hda
root=/dev/hda5
install=/boot/boot.b
map=/boot/map
vga=ask
delay=50
other=/dev/hda1
label=lilochain


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You can then run lilo -C lilo.conf.mbr to install lilo into your MBR. And don´t forget to run lilo to have lilo in the boot sector of your hard-drive.