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Re: new Etch install fails to boot



On 08/01/2007 07:23 AM, Steve Kleene wrote:

The motherboard (Abit BX133 440BX) has four IDE connectors allowing 8 drives in total. hda-hdd have a speed of 33 MB/s max. hde-hdh have a speed of 66 MB/s max. So I have always had the two hard drives connected to hde and hdf. There are no other hard drives. [...]

I think I smell a bug in the installer. Your HD configuration may be "throwing it for a loop."

You probably will have to install Lilo manually--with minimal help from the Debian installation and configuration system.

I used to have fun with this when I used Lilo in conjunction with another Linux distro :-)


I forget which device the CD drive is, but most of the IDE connectors are not connected to anything. Since I brought this up 6 years ago, the MBR has been on hde and supported both Win98 and Red Hat. This all worked until I tried to build Etch on hde (with no Windows).

It is a good idea that maybe grub is trying to read the MBR on the wrong disk (hdf). I may have to break down and disconnect hdf before I resume. I may also try to read the MBR with "od" if it's available just to see where this string "GRUB Loading stage1.5: is coming from.


I'd suspect that the BIOS is trying to load the MBR from /dev/hde, so Lilo or Grub needs to write its MBR there. Here are some WRONG places to which the "boot-loader" might be writing:

/dev/hde1
/dev/hde2
/dev/hde3
/dev/hde5
/dev/hdf
/dev/hdf1
/dev/hdf2
...(anything on hdf)...


I did not try to edit the lilo.conf that was installed. It was really a bare-bones file.

Thanks.



After you change it, always remember to do /sbin/lilo. And after you change any file referenced by /etc/lilo.conf, always remember to do /sbin/lilo.





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