Re: System won't boot, "lilo.conf" problem and Re: hard drive
Quoting Hamish Moffatt (hamish@debian.org):
> On Sat, Jan 09, 1999 at 04:22:15PM +0100, Peter Bartosch wrote:
> > > I have the same situation to Tam. Whenever I boot my PC, It only
> > > show " LI" and freeze. The different thing is I have only one disk (
> > > 2GB) and all dedicated to linux. No other operating system inside.
> > > The /etc/lilo.conf content is
> > > boot=/dev/hda1
> > ^---
> >
> > you have to write "boot=/dev/hda" here -- lilo should be written into the
> > mba of the first drive not the first partition (which have no mba)
>
> No, that's not correct. boot=/dev/hda1 is fine, as long as "mbr" or
> the standard MS-DOS boot code is in the master boot record, and the Linux
> partition is marked active.
>
> I suggest leaving the configuration file alone and just running /sbin/lilo
> again; that might fix it.
Oops, you've reminded me. That was the other change I had to make,
boot=/dev/hda instead of boot=/dev/hda2 (in my case, swap is first).
The first change being to add linear, see the "hard drive" thread".
Only when I reverted to rebuilding the disk in my ancient 486 was I able
to revert to non-linear and boot=/dev/hda2. From a position of ignorance,
I can only suppose that the DOS mbr couldn't find /dev/hda2 because the
BIOS which it was cooperating with did not understand the geometry of
the disk.
Cheers,
--
Email: d.wright@open.ac.uk Tel: +44 1908 653 739 Fax: +44 1908 655 151
Snail: David Wright, Earth Science Dept., Milton Keynes, England, MK7 6AA
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