The LILO program, or Linux loader, can be used to boot a Linux system. There are other ways to boot Linux as well, of course.

The default Linux install has an unintended side-effect on NT machines. If LILO is installed over the master boot record, or MBR, Linux can boot without difficulty, but NT won't boot at all. You have to do a 'lilo -u' (LILO uninstall) to restore the MBR and make the machines bootable in NT.

  • Create boot disks to bring up Linux on the NT machines. The executable binary for Linux is a file called vmlinuz-2.x.y for some integers x and y, depending on the exact version of Linux. For vmlinuz-2.0.32, for example, this boot floppy is created as follows: 
    cp vmlinuz-2.0.32 vmlinuz.backup
rdev vmlinuz-2.0.32 /dev/hda5
cp vmlinuz-2.0.32 /dev/fd0
cp vmlinuz.backup vmlinuz-2.0.32

    where the rdev command tells the kernel where to find the root partition. (If your machine was partitioned with the Linux root on, for example, /dev/hda2 instead of /dev/hda5, you'd change this command accordingly.)
  • To prevent any possible harm to the NT partition, we should arrange to mount the /dos partition read-only. To do this, edit the /etc/fstab as shown. Note the ,ro on the second line, which makes the /dos partition read-only. When you make this change in fstab, you will have to reboot for it to take effect. 
    /dev/hda2               /                       ext2    defaults        1 1
/dev/hda1               /dos                    msdos   defaults,ro     0 0
/dev/hda3               swap                    swap    defaults        0 0
/dev/fd0                /mnt/floppy             ext2    noauto          0 0
/dev/cdrom              /mnt/cdrom              iso9660 noauto,ro       0 0
none                    /proc                   proc    defaults        0 0