2 <title>Making the LFS system bootable</title>
3 <?dbhtml filename="lilo.html" dir="chapter08"?>
5 <para>In order to be able to boot the LFS system, we need to update our
6 bootloader. We're assuming that your host system is using Lilo (since
7 that's the most commonly used boot loader at the moment).</para>
9 <para>We will not be running the lilo program inside chroot. Running lilo
10 inside chroot can have fatal side-effects which render your MBR useless
11 and you'd need a boot disk to be able to start any Linux system (either
12 the host system or the LFS system).</para>
14 <para>First we'll exit chroot and copy the lfskernel file to the host
17 <para><screen><userinput>logout</userinput>
18 <userinput>cp $LFS/boot/lfskernel /boot</userinput></screen></para>
20 <para>The next step is adding an entry to /etc/lilo.conf so that we can
21 choose LFS when booting the computer:</para>
23 <para><screen><userinput>cat >> /etc/lilo.conf << "EOF"</userinput>
26 root=<partition>
28 <userinput>EOF</userinput></screen></para>
30 <para><partition> must be replaced with the LFS
31 partition's designation.</para>
33 <para>Also note that if you are using reiserfs for your root partition,
34 the line <userinput>read-only</userinput> should be changed to
35 <userinput>read-write</userinput>.</para>
37 <para>Now, update the boot loader by running:</para>
39 <para><screen><userinput>/sbin/lilo -v</userinput></screen></para>
41 <para>The last step is synchronizing the host system's lilo
42 configuration files with the LFS system's:</para>
44 <para><screen><userinput>cp /etc/lilo.conf $LFS/etc &&
45 cp $(grep "image.*=" /etc/lilo.conf | cut -f 2 -d "=") $LFS/boot</userinput></screen></para>