ELILO dual boot
Posted: 2018-02-09 Filed under: system | Tags: bios, boot, efi, ELILO, elilo.conf, UEFI, windows Leave a commentI use a computer that has to have Linux and Windows 10 installed in parallel. Windows came pre-installed and requires UEFI… Therefore I went through Slackware’s instructions “To use UEFI, or not to use UEFI?” before installing Slackware. I told the installer to use ELILO and upon reboot, the system booted straight to Slackware. I installed Slackware -current, but that’s a separate story… Now I want to have the option to dual boot Windows and Linux.
Unfortunatelly elilo.conf
, found in /boot/efi/EFI/Slackware/
is poorly commented and I could not figure out right away what I needed to do. I googled around and found this blog post about ELILO.
I copied my kernel image and its corresponding initrd
file from /boot
to /boot/efi/EFI/Slackware
. Then I modified elilo.conf as follows:
chooser=simple delay=100 timeout=100 default=Windows # image=vmlinuz label=vmlinuz read-only append="root=/dev/sda5 vga=normal ro" image=vmlinuz-generic-4.14.17 label=gen initrd=initrd-4.14.17.gz append="root=/dev/sda5 vga=normal vt.default_utf8=1 ro" image=vmlinuz-generic-4.15.0-rc9 label=rc initrd=initrd-4.15.0-rc9.gz append="root=/dev/sda5 vga=normal vt.default_utf8=1 ro" image=dummy label=Windows
I could not find an easy way to make Windows bootable. However. I noticed that when I had some menu entry that was not correct (e.g. image=
pointing to a non existing kernel image), the computer would boot to Windows if I did nothing at the ELILO ..........
step. That’s why I made the dummy boot option there with label=Windows
and specified it as default boot option. Not the most elegant solution, but it does the job.
For now, I am going to leave things like this.