OK, I got Porteus to fully boot from exFAT on LILO, but it required a few more fixes.
Considering FAT and NTFS, having exFAT as a real option is nice.
This is now outside the scope of the OP. Maybe I should make a new thread for searchers. But I would feel like that 'guy who leaves the room while talking and expects you to follow him'.
LILO Issue #1: Suppressed interactivity
So I run the installer on an exFAT drive, enter 'ok' and it freezes. I hit enter again, and it exits and nothing was done to the drive.
This is because lilo.com was giving a warning for the exFAT volume and prompting for confirmation, but the user cannot see the prompt, because it is >/dev/null.
I would remove ">/dev/null 2>&1" from this line to allow the interactivity:
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"$bin"/lilo.com -P ignore -C "$lilo_menu" -S "$IPT"/syslinux -m "$IPT"/syslinux/lilo.map >/dev/null 2>&1
LILO Issue #2: Wrong default mode
If you bypass the warning it is giving, it corrupts the drive, because the default install mode is apparently wrong.
Once you remove the >/dev/null, you see this:
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Warning: /media/josh/Porteus/boot/syslinux/lilo.menu should be owned by root
Warning: /dev/sdd1 is not on the first disk
Warning: partition type 0x07 on device 0x0831 is a dangerous place for
a boot sector. A DOS/Windows system may be rendered unbootable.
The backup copy of this boot sector should be retained.
Proceed? [N/y]
(Note the prompt at end.)
This is the installer.com's default mode of installing to the partition boot sector instead of to the MBR.
If you enter "y" and force it to proceed, it corrupts the drive (no longer mountable). See #3 below for easy fix.
LILO Issue #3: Three bad if's
To workaround issue #2 (above), installer.com was designed to let the user override the mode with
-f (undocumented I guess):
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if [ $(echo $* | grep -Eqo "\-f( |\$)") ]; then
LILO=MBR
else
But in the uploaded version, that conditional is wrong.
grep -q doesn't write to stdout, so the value of $(...) is always the empty string, and so the conditional [...] is always false.
You can test this in a shell:
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[ $(echo "hi" | grep -q "hi") ] && echo "this will never print"
[ $(echo "bye" | grep -q "hi") ] && echo "this will never print"
This replacement will evaluate the exit code of grep, which is what we want:
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if echo $* | grep -Eqo "\-f( |\$)"; then
LILO=MBR
else
Similarly this..
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if [ $(echo "$FS" | grep -q xfs) ]; then
...can be fixed with this:
And a third one here:
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echo "Installing Porteus to $PRT"
if [ ! $(echo $* | grep -Eqo "\-a( |\$)") ]; then
...with this:
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echo "Installing Porteus to $PRT"
if ! echo $* | grep -Eqo "\-a( |\$)"; then
(You can enclose the pipe in a plain subshell
() if you want, but
! will work either way.)
At this point, you can now get LILO to install by running:
Code: Select all
sudo bash Porteus-installer-for-Linux.com -- -f
Per issue #2, to make this the default for exFAT, you could use this for the first conditional:
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if echo $* | grep -Eqo "\-f( |\$)" || echo "$FS" | grep -q exfat; then
I don't know what's sane for
other filesystems. (I don't know much about bootloader stages rly.)
LILO Issue #4: Spaces again
LILO fails loading the config if there are spaces in the volume label (through $IPT).
To fix this, you can edit the template "boot/syslinux/lilo.conf", changing all occurrences of this:
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image=DO_NOT_CHANGE/vmlinuz
initrd=DO_NOT_CHANGE/initrd.xz
...to this instead:
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image="DO_NOT_CHANGE/vmlinuz"
initrd="DO_NOT_CHANGE/initrd.xz"
also the
plpbt line
RESULT
Applying all 4 fixes, the script successfully installed Porteus to an MBR/exFAT volume with spaces in the label, and it boots to desktop.
Porteus-installer-for-Linux.com 
)
