Lately, we installed additional memory on our Debian (lenny) servers and installed ‘bigmem’ kernel for our 32-bit systems to recognize more than 3GB of ram. Bigmem kernel installations went fine on servers with Grub as their boot loader – most of them uses Grub. But on one machine with Lilo as boot loader, it didn’t boot on bigmem kernel and below was the entry on /etc/lilo.conf.
# Boot up Linux by default.
default=Linux
image=/vmlinuz
label=Linux
read-only
# restricted
# alias=1
initrd=/initrd.imgimage=/vmlinuz.old
label=LinuxOLD
read-only
optional
# restricted
# alias=2
initrd=/initrd.img.old
From this config I don’t see the details of which kernel is the old one and the bigmem. I also tried to set the default to kernel with “LinuxOLD” label but it points to the same kernel (not the bigmem). I solved my problem by modifying the /etc/lilo.conf config as follows:
# image=/vmlinuz
image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.26-2-686-bigmem
initrd=/boot/initrd.img-2.6.26-2-686-bigmem
label=Linux
read-only
# restricted
# alias=1
#initrd=/initrd.img
NOTE: Don’t forget to test first your changes on the /etc/lilo.conf by running ‘lilo’ command – this will verify your changes.
