apt-get dist-upgrade breaks lilo
Hi
I have a lab with 7 pc's. They have been running first debian 2.0, and
then 2.1, for almost two years. The machines are identical and
dual boot. The master boot program is NT, and LILO is one of the options
on it. There is one hard drive. NT is on the first partion,
linux swap on the second, and linux on the third. The kernel is 2.0.36.
It has worked fine for all this time. The NT part still does.
This week (Tuesday Nov 6) I tried to upgrade to 2.2. I did
(from ftp.us.debian.org) apt-get update, apt-get upgrade,
and then, on all but one of the seven, apt-get dist-upgrade.
Now, on all except the one treated differently, lilo fails
with LIL-. The other one still boots just fine, and reports debian 2.2
when it does. I can floppy-boot into the others and the systems seem fine
once I do, reporting debian 2.2, and I can run /sbin/lilo on them.
The lilo docs say that LIL- is a symptom of geometry mismatch.
I have tried various ways, in /etc/lilo.conf, to get the proper
geometry to lilo, but without success.
When I run /sbin/lilo -q -v -v -v the output is not consistent.
I cannot find a guide to the output format so I am not sure if that
is a problem.
In particular it says, for example,
Images:
Linux * <dev=0x80, hd=183, cyl=58,sct=105>,
but the cyl and sct numbers are different if I repeat the command.
The reported 'partition offset' on the one that works does not agree
with that on the ones that don't.
I've tried -p fix, -P ignore, -l, with no success.
I downgraded to lilo version 20 on one of the machines, again
with no success.
Can anyone help me get lilo to work?
Thanks
Charles Kaufman
chuck@uri.edu
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