A Solution: LILO stops at "LI"
I noticed a few different posts from people having similar
problems to mine (a couple of examples follow), in which
LILO would stop after just typing "LI" on the screen and
hang up. Various different reasons for the problem were
proposed, centering on hardware compatibility problems.
After examining the changelogs, I got the impression that
LILO went through a major clean-out of "obsolete features"
between the versions used in Debian 2.1 and Debian 2.2,
so I suspected that the Slink LILO might work better. And,
indeed, when I downgraded the "lilo" package to the one on
my Slink (Debian 2.1) CDs, this fixed my problem. As you
might expect, there's no major problems associated with
using the older LILO with the newer distribution (nothing
really seems to depend on it, since all it does is load
the kernel, which then takes over).
The computer I'm using is pretty old -- most likely I need
one or more of the "obsolete" features in order for it to
boot.
Anyway, for the inexperienced, downgrading a package is
simple, with the Debian 2.1 CD Binary CD #1 in the drive
(mounted at /cdrom):
dpkg -i /cdrom/dists/slink/main/binary-i386/base/lilo*.deb
ought to do the trick (check the directory first with "ls"
to make sure this is right). You don't have to do anything
special to downgrade a package, it's allowed by default.
After installing, you will be prompted for whether you want
to run LILO to create a new lilo.conf and install the new
boot block right away. The instructions above this warn
you not to do it, but it seems to be the right thing to do.
I made a backup of /etc/lilo.conf (copied it to lilo.conf.old),
before doing the downgrade.
Oh yeah, of course, in order to get this far, I had to have
booted without a working LILO. Use the CD (or boot-disk) to
boot in "rescue" mode, i.e., at the boot prompt, type:
rescue root=/dev/hda1
(or whatever the correct boot device is on your system).
I thought this might be worth posting in case other people
run into this problem. This is perhaps not the ideal fix,
but it's easy.
Jeff Davis wrote:
> I have had this problem before as well. I do not know what causes it, although
> it usually happens after some kind of hardware issue.
>
> Reinstall LILO and it should work fine. I am not extremely familiar with this
> process, but there are good man pages (man lilo and man lilo.conf). Here are
> some ideas I have:
> I have not had this problem in a while. I assumed that the newer versions of
> lilo are rid of this. What version are you running?
> Andrew McRobert wrote:
> > I tried adding a ULTRA SCSI hard disk to the server
[....]
> > If I disconnect it, ie. take my system back to exactly the way it was
> > before, LILO stops at "LI"???!?!?!?
--
Terry Hancock
hancock@earthlink.net
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