Reactivating DOS and Windows
After installing the base system and writing to the Master Boot
Record, you will be able to boot Linux, but probably nothing else.
This depends what you have chosen during the installation. This chapter
will describe how you can reactivate your old systems so that you can also
boot your DOS or Windows again.
LILO is a boot manager with which you can also boot
other operating systems than Linux, which complies to PC
conventions. The boot manager is configured via
/etc/lilo.conf file. Whenever you edited this
file you have to run lilo afterwards. The reason
for this is that the changes will take place only when you call the
program.
Important parts of the lilo.conf file are the
lines containing the image and
other keywords, as well as the lines following
those. They can be used to describe a system which can be booted by
LILO. Such a system can include a kernel
(image), a root partition, additional kernel
parameters, etc. as well as a configuration to boot another, non-Linux
(other) operating system. These keywords can
also be used more than once. The ordering of these systems within the
configuration file is important because it determines which system
will be booted automatically after, for instance, a timeout
(delay) presuming LILO
wasn't stopped by pressing the shift key.
After a fresh install of Debian, just the current system is configured
for booting with LILO. If you want to boot another
Linux kernel, you have to edit the configuration file
/etc/lilo.conf to add the following lines:
&additional-lilo-image;
For a basic setup just the first two lines are necessary. If you want
to know more about the other two options please have a look at the
LILO documentation. This can be found in
/usr/share/doc/lilo/. The file which should be
read is Manual.txt. To have a quicker start into
the world of booting a system you can also look at the
LILO man pages lilo.conf for
an overview of configuration keywords and lilo
for description of the installation of the new configuration into the
boot sector.
Notice that there are other boot loaders available in &debian;, such as
GRUB (in grub package),
CHOS (in chos package),
Extended-IPL (in extipl package),
loadlin (in loadlin package) etc.