Re: Unable to boot from hdd with recent lilo/mbr packages!!!
On Wednesday 30 May 2001 13:12, Olaf Stetzer wrote:
> > 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 have no windows at all on my notebook, but there was a minimal sort of
> dos on it when I bought it. I think that the dos mbr remained on the hdd
> until my problems started and I played around with lilo and mbr.
OK, here is what I think happened.
I think that previously you were not using the Debian MBR and you had a DOS
MBR loading the LILO code from /dev/hda2.
Then when things broke with LILO you over-wrote the DOS MBR and things really
went wrong.
Now you said that boot-compat.b didn't work, was that when you had
boot=/dev/hda or boot=/dev/hda2?
To use boot-compat.b and gain any benefit from it you MUST have
boot=/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.
>
> OK, good idead I will try to organize a dos bootable disk with fdisk and
> try it that way!
That should work. Also putting boot-compat.b in /dev/hda is likely to work
as well. I would really like to know whether boot-compat.b works for you and
would greatly appreciate it if you could try this.
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