Re: Unable to boot from hdd with recent lilo/mbr packages!!!
> Maybe this will help tracking down the problem: When I re-activated /dev/hda2
> with cfdisk after writing the table I got:
> wrote table but re-read failed. Reboot to ....
> Strange!
Not so much, thats the usual behaviour, that's caused because you are
editting a partition table that involves partitions that are mounted, and
thus it cannot reread it without risking that the new definition doesn't
move the partitions or change their sizes to a diferent ones from those
mounted.
> Why is cfdisk reporting 7.75 Mb unusable space and fdisk just
> prints 4 partitions?
ok, I have examined your partition and here may be the answer to all your
problem... your partition looks weird, let's see...
Start | End | Relative | Size in
Head Cyl Sect |Head Cyl Sect | Start | Sectors
-------------------------------------------------------------
0 1 1 | 239 37 63 | 15120| 559440
0 38 1 | 239 38 63 | 574560| 15120
0 39 1 | 239 51 63 | 589680| 196560
0 52 1 | 239 775 63 | 786240|10946880
Ok, I suppose everything is well calculated, at least that's what my casio
calculator says :-) but none of them is marked active, on the output you
sent to me before you had partition hda2 active. I see hda3 is swap but...
what is hda1? it has type 84, OS2 hidden?
Well, what seems weird id partition hda1, and this may be spoiling your
boot, just a guess, though, usually the first partition starts on head 1
cylinder 0 sector 1 and this one starts much later, leaving the first
cilynder empty, those are the 7.75MB that cfdisk tells you that are
unusable.
If you are not using hda1 for anything, I would delete it and create a new
partition over there one that takes the hole free space there.
Maybe that let's you boot again.
But... this doesn't make much sense if it stopped booting just for changing
the lilo and the mbr if you did not change any other thing.
Also it could be that your BIOS checks to see if the first partition is
bootable or not, and before you had it marked bootable even though you were
booting some other partition.
So, if you are not using hda1 I'd try to do what I told you and mark hda2 as
bootable using normal fdisk, forget about cfdisk, also do a verify (v) on
fdisk, it should tell you that you have some free sectors, but nothing else.
Make sure you have lilo on hda2 and leave the mbr as it is, it is ok on your
last dd. If this doesn't work, and hda1 is your recently made partition,
format it in ext2 mark only hda1 as bootable and put lilo there, again, no
need to reinstall mbr, maybe this helps.
Well, I cannot tell you any more, go trying the various posibilities I have
told you about and if they don't work or if it is imposible to make that,
then tell me more, as I need more info on what happened to know what to do
now, and keep on sending me the dd output as it shows me how you have
everything.
BTW, I think we are boring the guys of debian-laptop with all this, and even
maybe Russel, what if we keep this between us and after you solve this, if
you want you send a report on what was going on to them :-?
Regards...
--
Manty/BestiaTester -> http://manty.net
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