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Re: Unable to boot from hdd with recent lilo/mbr packages!!!



On Wednesday 30 May 2001 11:45, Santiago Garcia Mantinan wrote:
> > Well, the lilo.conf i sent was just the last configuration I tried,
> > before that I also tried boot=/dev/hda!
>
> Well, you now have a LILO mbr at /dev/hda, so debian mbr is not there at
> all, if you want to put it back you can try to use install-mbr /dev/hda
> I'm almost positive that Debian's mbr will work as expected, not so sure
> about LILO if as you said there is an incompatibility issue, but installing
> Debian mbr may help your BIOS allow you to boot from HD again.

Here is the relevant compatibility code relating to boot-compat.b.  The sole 
difference between boot-compat.b and boot.b is that boot-compat.b is produced 
with BROKEN_BIOS_COMPATIBILITY defined (so it won't boot NT4).

_main:
#ifndef BROKEN_BIOS_COMPATIBILITY
       cli                     ! NT 4 blows up if this is missing
#endif

I expect that your MBR boots NT4 and as I believe that the problem is the 
laptop can not use a boot loader that works with NT4 I think it's likely that 
your code will not work with it.  However I don't know for sure as I can not 
spare the time required to read the code at the moment.

> > I was afraid that this is the problem. Now I am really scared that I
> > might get in troubles twhen I try to fix that!
>
> Don't worry, if you don't do any weird thing you should not get into
> trouble, at least not more than the trouble you have now ;-)
>
> If I was you I'd try to install Debian mbr and then see if now LILO get's
> called, if it is and you see the LI... prompt, then you know Debian mbr is
> working ok, and you can try different lilo setups allways having lilo
> installed on /dev/hda2 and not /dev/hda.

Another option that probably hasn't been considered.  Boot up dos and run 
"fdisk /mbr" to put the DOS MBR on it.  I'm certain that no-one has released 
a PC which is unable to boot DOS...  If LILO is then installed to /dev/hda2 
and /dev/hda2 is marked as active in the partition table then DOS should load 
up LILO and things should be fine.

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