Re: donut is dead, long live the donut
Oswald Buddenhagen <ob6@inf.tu-dresden.de> writes:
DZM> I've tried reinstalling both LILO and the Debian MBR. Neither
DZM> 'install-mbr' nor rerunning 'liloconfig' seems to have had an effect.
OB> i don't know, what liloconfig is for, but does it automatically run lilo?
OB> the invocation of /sbin/lilo does the actual installation of the
OB> boot sector/mbr ...
Actually, it doesn't. (And yes, I have run both LILO and installed
the Debian MBR directly; that had no effect.) The default setup is to
install LILO on the root partition, rather than in the MBR. A short
specialized MBR is installed instead. Just about all of the
functionality it has is to offer a choice of partitions to boot from,
with a default of the first active partition. It doesn't even have
much of an interface; for me, it would display "1FA:" if tweaked.
But this turns out not to have been a problem. After messing with
things some more and finally creating a floppy with GRUB on it, I
discovered that the system would just freeze if I tried to touch the
hard drive before a Linux kernel booted. I traced this back to a BIOS
setting: my system has a known buggy CMD640 IDE interface, and I had
disabled the "write prefetch" option in the BIOS. The system *really*
didn't like this, apparently, I re-enabled it and everything is
more-or-less happy now.
--
David Maze dmaze@mit.edu http://www.mit.edu/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal."
-- Abra Mitchell
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