Now What? New Distribution Woes

[Brian Densmore]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Robert Kennedy
> 
> However, if I remove the floppy, the machine tries to
> boot Red Hat. The bios check sees both HD's. The RH
> Lilo goes by. The HD's are detected. Autorun finishes.
> 
> Then POOF! Warning: unable to open initial console.
> 
> Kernel panic: NO init found. Try passing init= option
> to kernel.
I'd say that Suse messed with your MBR record. Try disconnecting the 
other disk and see if RH comes up to confirm this.
Also Lilo doesn't do real good at having multiple bootable disks with
MBRs,
and it really doesn't like being on the second disk at all.

> 
> Then everything stops. (I've got a few more details,
> if needed.)
yep
> 
> I'd like to be able to boot Red Hat, but that's not
> necessary. I do need to salvage files and my family's
> internet favorites listings.
Once you get booted, you can create a mount point (if it doesn't already
exist)
in say /mnt/disk to the old disk. and then you can access your files.
You will need
a mount point for each partition.

example you have these partitions on the first disk:
/dev/hda1 /boot
/dev/hda2 /home
/dev/hda5 /
/dev/hda6 /var
/dev/hda7 swap

you would want these empty directories in /mnt
/mnt/disk
/mnt/disk/home
/mnt/disk/var
then you could mount the disk like this:
mount /dev/hda5 /mnt/disk
mount /dev/hda5 /mnt/disk/home
mount /dev/hda5 /mnt/disk/var

make sure to mount the root point first. ;)

Also to get redhat working again, you could do this
Use the boot floppy from RH and at the boot prompt enter:
linux root=/dev/hda5
your command line will of course be different.

Once you get access to that disk again, you should copy the entries from
/etc/lilo.conf to the suse disk's lilo.conf and rerun lilo from Suse and
conversely
copy the suse entry to the RH lilo.conf and rerun lilo under RH.

Hope these hints are useful. I could give you much more detailed info if
you want.

Brian