[olug] Slackware + LILO and changing number of disks = FAIL

[Kevin D. Snodgrass]

Installed the latest Slackware, works fine, except...

It uses LILO, and LILO uses "root=/dev/sda5" style addressing.  The docs say you can use UUIDs, but so far I haven't been successful in doing so.  Kernel panics every try.  This system will regularly have changes in the number and configuration of hard drives, might be just the 80GB drive attached to the installed IDE port, might be up to 8 drives attached to the 3ware controller.

Also, it appears the when you run "lilo" after making changes to the /etc/lilo.conf file, it hard codes something into the MBR that references the major/minor device numbers of the / partition, in my case "0805".  That's all fine, as long as during system init the boot drive gets assigned /dev/sda, but fails miserably otherwise.  "Otherwise" happens most of the time and since I will be changing the number of drives on this system often (I will never put the side back on the case) anything that hard codes something like that will never work for me.


Any "good" options that I haven't found documented yet for using LILO?  Or am I better off installing grub and using the kernel command line option "UUID=...." ?

Note: This is an ancient system, only has 512MB RAM and installing other "modern" distros may be challenging.  Fedora 15 took some major work, gentoo took forever.  X-Windows need not be installed, this is a fileserver only system.

Kevin D. Snodgrass