Re: Unable to boot from hard drive

[ajlewis2@intac.com]

In linux.debian.user, you wrote:
> 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

In the first question:  I don't know if the mbr should be wiped clean, but
it can be done by doing '/sbin/lilo -u'.  I assume the bootable flag is what
shows it where to look.

The installation on the floppy has shown you that this is a hard drive and
or BIOS problem.  Here are those two error messages from
/usr/doc/lilo/Manual.txt.gz
-------------
0x01   "Illegal command". This shouldn't happen, but if it does, it may
    indicate an attempt to access a disk which is not supported by the
    BIOS. See also "Warning: BIOS drive 0x<number> may not be accessible"
    in section "Warnings".
0x02   "Address mark not found". This usually indicates a media problem.
    Try again several times.
--------------

And:
--------------
Warning: BIOS drive 0x<number> may not be accessible
     Because most BIOS versions only support two floppies and two hard
    disks, files located on additional disks may be inaccessible. This
    warning indicates that some kernels or even the whole system may be
    unbootable.
------------
The Warning does not seem to be your problem since you are using /dev/hda. 
I'm sorry to say that we are now into something I know nothing about.  I
have gotten the 0101 thing before when I had /boot over 1024 and/or on
secondary IDE, but that is not your problem.  

The disk must be ok, since you can boot if you have the kernel on floppy,
but for some reason you cannot with LILO.  You might benefit from wading
through that lilo manual in /usr/doc/lilo/.  Maybe you can ask the question
again with the information from the floppy lilo attempt and whatever happens
if you try the lilo with boot=/dev/hda1.  

Good luck.
Anita