LILO disaster: L 01 01 01 ...

[Andreas Gartus <andreas.gartus@akh-wien.ac.at>]

Hi!

I have two HD's. Although "hdb" (40GB) is not recognised by the BIOS,
booting Debian 2.2 on "hdb" worked fine with LILO on the MBR of "hda".
But yesterday I installed RedHat 7.2 on a spare partition of "hdb" and
now LILO stopps with "L 01 01 01 ..."!
However, I can reach my Debian system with a boot floppy - everything is
still there. But it's impossible to boot from the HD!

My "lilo.conf" looks like:
("/boot" is inside the 1024 cylinder limit!)

boot=/dev/hda
install=/boot/boot.b
map=/boot/map
vga=normal
prompt
timeout=50
image=/vmlinuz
        label=debian
        root=/dev/hdb3
        read-only
image=/vmlinuz.old
        label=debian.old
        root=/dev/hdb3
        read-only

Rerunning lilo doesn't help. (BTW: I get no errors when I run lilo - it
just refuses to boot later.) The "linear" option doesn't help. Setting
the disk geometry with "disk=..." doesn't help. Making a DOS MBR with
"FDISK /MBR" and copying it to "hdb" doesn't help. I have no idea what
really happend but I think RatHat must have done something to "hdb" that
makes it impossible for LILO to access it's second-stage boot loader on
it.
Although my system still works with a boot floppy I would appreciate any
suggestions.

Thanx,
Andy G. 8-)

PS: Please CC me your mails - I'm not on the list.