Re: Unable to boot from hard drive
You wrote:
>The manual says this:
>(<nothing>) No part of LILO has been loaded. LILO either isn't installed
> or the partition on which its boot sector is located isn't active
>
>I don't know what it means by that except that it sounds like it would
>be important if you were putting LILO in a partition and not in the mbr. I
>have the line boot=/dev/hda as the first line. That may be important.
That's how i have mine, set to /dev/hda instead of /dev/hda1 (the mbr
instead of at the start of my boot partition). If lilo is installed
in a partition instead of in the mbr, (a) should the mbr be wiped
clean, and if so how, and (b) how does the system know which partition
to transfer control to if there is nothing in the mbr? Is that where
the partition flagged bootable takes over?
>I'm curious what would happen if you tried installing lilo on a floppy. I
>know it's not a solution, but it would be additional information. You can
>do this by changing the top line to boot=/dev/fd0 and put a floppy in the
>drive and run /sbin/lilo. Then see if it will boot from that. If that
>works, then it at least shows you that this problem has to do with where
>LILO is getting installed. Maybe you could just install it on /dev/hda1
>instead of the mbr.
OK, after installing to a floppy (the boot=/dev/fd0 was the only
change i made), i get a 'L 01 20 20 20 ...', but at least it's
loading. I don't know what that means; i can get lilo to load when
installed to a floppy, but not when installed identically to the mbr
of my hard drive.
Is there a way to check what the mbr should look like after lilo has
been properly installed? I ran
'dd if=/dev/hda of=./mbr.dat bs=512 count=1'
and 'LILO' shows up in bytes 6-9, so it looks like it's being
installed (either correctly or not) in the first blocks of the hard
drive.
--
\ / Mike Miller \ fudu00@netscape.net
\/ GATech - CmpE \ gte296k@prism.gatech.edu
\/\/ CS1322 TA \ sarge@cc.gatech.edu
/\/\
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