[ale] SuSE floppy weirdness

[Rafos701 at aol.com]

I too have swappable hdd's. Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â 
And SuSE: everything is on either            
caddies or within a docking station           
I've not seen the floppyless lilo screen on 7.3, but SuSE 7.1 allows your text
in the form of "root=/dev/hdXX " *** suggestion (typed in) to your kernel to boot
no matter how often you remove or replace the [caddy.] Your experience may indicate that you have to, I guess, run lilo every time you put this thing in, but you shouldn't conclude a lilo cmmd run w/o error won't be reliable. It could be something other than what you've concluded it is.
Having LILO spelled partially when your machine is awakening is classical stuff which is concisely covered in one of the HOWTO's or such. You might have one of those floppies what has a bunch of bad sectors. If you still have your CD, (DK about the DVD,) and can get into Linux, going through the hoops, I think everything you need is on the first CD in the disks dir, somewhere if it isn't at root. Then you can just go "dd if=/dev/SuSECD
mount your SuSE CD #1 on /cdrom  ;you know how to do that.
just go "dd if=/cdrom/disks/[kernel name you picked after reading "Which one"] of=/dev/fd0"
BE SURE TO ADD [space] "bs=18k" THEN NEVER USE dd AGAIN without reading about it.
I think you can copy a little kernel of 600k or so, find syslinux.* somewhere, and try and fit an initrd from wherever onto it and  that may work. If you have linux on all your drives, (Slakware 7|8 runs on less than 200M) a linux that you are changing from inside the notebook to slave in the docking station can be mounted and its fstab changed (ALTYCFIN-SIDSMFC)(so that its references agree with the paddle's (the controller; to which the ribbon cables run))(I just vi it, but a real ale'er would sed it,) [ALTYCFIN-SIDSMFC]so that you can boot that /dev/hdcX or /dev/hdiX etc with the lilo running on your first drive. RedHat has variables in its fstab, and ale had something about it last month or so, but I've only pasted it and not read.
I have some difficulties figuring out SuSE, YaST tOO.



***(where maybe something complains omission of ro, or rw - but since I do get a panic when fstab doesn't agree. I used to try this with mount, because I think slakware (the great) named its kernel, (in lilo's terms,) "mount," but the option(s) present in SuSE 7X's lilo screen are the names you use.

*wildcard symbol

I'm wondering, though, if I will be able to      drift to  tangential and irrelevant          OT ,spun-off topics, or remotely connted ones, from within hard-won semi coherence, ala Bronsky, or that "Connections" guy, with SGML's and stuff. This removed from the initial parts in compromise between consistency and attempt to know something. It's aroused some envy in me that those in this group have learned stuff and retained it, although a vague awareness that complaints of envy facilitate these dweebonics sharpening my brain any.