Booting OS Installed on Different Physical Drive in LILO

Booting an OS installed on other physical hard drive could be daunting at times.
However, one LILO keyword could prove very helpful:

master-boot

This keyword means (taken straight from LILO's repertoire):

'master-boot This flag (LILO version 22.5) indicates a DOS/Windows/OS2 or other system which will only boot from BIOS device 0x80, the "C:" drive, or BIOS device 0, the A: drive. When this flag is specified, if this drive is not assigned device code 0x80 or 0 by the BIOS, then the chain loader will dynamically swap the device code actually assigned with device code 0x80 or 0 to make this drive appear to be the first hard or floppy drive, "C:" or "A:".'


In my setup, the default boot drive is sda1 while M$ Windoze XP SP2 is installed on hda1. It seems to be M$ Windoze XP SP2 cannot boot unless its drive appear to be the first hard drive. This is the relevant excerpt from my /etc/lilo.conf:

# LILO configuration file
# generated by 'liloconfig'
#
# Start LILO global section
boot = /dev/sda
#compact        # faster, but won't work on all systems.
lba32
...
# Linux bootable partition config begins
image = /boot/vmlinuz
  root = /dev/sda1
  label = Slamd64-12.1
  read-only  # Partitions should be mounted read-only for checking
...
# Linux bootable partition config ends

# Windows bootable partition config begins
other = /dev/hda1
  label = Windows
  table = /dev/hda
  master-boot
# Windows bootable partition config ends

That's it. You should be able to boot from Windoze or other "insane" OS from other hard drive with LILO.

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