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.

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# Boot up Linux by default.
default=Linux

image=/vmlinuz
        label=Linux
        read-only
#       restricted
#       alias=1
        initrd=/initrd.img

image=/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:

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# 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.