Recently I have been receiving a number of bug reports of LILO upgrades unexpectedly resulting in a non-bootable system. I have just received the following message which purports to explain it. If your system matches the below description (2.4.10 kernel with first partition being Ext2 and having /boot for booting with LILO) then I suggest doing the following: 1) Put LILO on hold if you haven't upgraded already. 2) Prepare an upgrade to 2.4.12 or a downgrade to 2.4.9 (kernels before 2.4.9 had security problems). 3) If you have already run "lilo" from kernel 2.4.10 or suspect that you have then either create a rescue floppy running a non 2.4.10 kernel or put your boot files on a different partition (one good option in such situations is to run swapoff and then mkfs your swap partition). 4) After booting from a better kernel immidiately run lilo to get a good boot map. Please note that I have not yet reproduced this on my own systems. However it may take some time for me to find a spare hard drive, format it as ext2, etc so I decided to warn you first. ---------- Forwarded Message ---------- Subject: Re: [reiserfs-list] Reiserfs-Fix in 2.4.12-ac2 Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2001 11:13:46 +0200 From: Jens Benecke <jens@jensbenecke.de> To: Russell Coker <russell@coker.com.au> > LILO boot sector bug? Well, if you run 2.4.10 and your first partition contains the /boot stuff, and you run LILO, LILO's kernel position information will be overwritten with file system data the next time you write to that partition (i.e. _during_ LILOs run because it updates /boot/map). The fix is to move /boot, mount / read-only, run LILO, then reboot (with / still read-only). This only affects ext2 systems (wish I had updated to ReiserFS when I had the machine here). -- http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++/ Bonnie++ hard drive benchmark http://www.coker.com.au/postal/ Postal SMTP/POP benchmark http://www.coker.com.au/projects.html Projects I am working on http://www.coker.com.au/~russell/ My home page
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