On 17 Jul 2003 rxl124@hehe.com wrote:

> Bill Marcum <bmarcum@iglou.com> wrote in message news:<l0chu-7ka.ln1@don.localnet>...
> > On 16 Jul 2003 10:36:07 -0700, rxl124@hehe.com
> > <rxl124@hehe.com> wrote:
> > > I have redhat 8.0
> > >
> > > I am experimenting w/ lilo and see if I can make it
> > >
> > > actually, i am tring to make it that lilo boot up sequence will fail
> > >
> > > I tried few things
> > > 1)messing w/ lilo.conf
> > > 2)removing lilo.conf all toghether
> > > 3)moving or messing w/ /boot folder
> > >
> > > NONE of them make it fail to boot up linux.
> > >
> > > What is going on?
> > > Can someone tell me what's going on w/ this ???
> >
> > Lilo.conf is only read when you run /sbin/lilo. The lilo boot loader
> > does not read the file system, it reads information that was stored by
> > the /sbin/lilo program. If you "mv" a file or folder within the same
> > filesystem, you only rename it, and the physical location of the data
> > stays the same. Look for the lilo documentation. On a Debian system it
> > is in /usr/share/doc/lilo. The exact location might vary in other
> > distros.
>
> Thank you guys. Now, I have skimped over the share doc and i
> understand now the structure of /boot and lilo
>
> However, I still don't understand how my machine was able to boot up,
> AFTER I removed /boot folder altogether..? Is it possible? or did I
> overlook something?

It depends what yo mean by "removed". I saw this very same behaviour very
recently and came up with the solution: At boot time, Lilo does not care
about what is mounted or not. In fact, nothing is mounted at that time.
Lilo looks for the file in the specified PARTITION. THe partition for
/boot is defined when /sbin/lilo is run.

So, if you removed /boot by merely removing the mount of a /boot
partition, you did nothing that affects lilo's boot process. Once booted
up, the system will appear to have no kernel or files from which to boot,
but really they are in the unmounted /boot partition.



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