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Re: lilo-22.3.2-3 trashed my SCSI disk



On Tue, 3 Sep 2002 08:44, Svante Signell wrote:
> After upgrade of lilo in unstable my whole SCSI disk got trashed. It
> could only be recovered with the use of the IBM drive fitness test
> tool, and a complete erase disk was necessary :-( What happened?

If you need to run an IBM diagnostics program to get your disk working then 
it's a hardware issue and nothing to do with LILO.

LILO like all Linux programs does not get to talk to the hardware directly and 
only gets to write data to the block device (/dev/sda or /dev/sda1).  If 
writing to such a device can require special IBM utilities to recover then 
it's a hardware or device driver issue (but most likely hardware).

> A reinstall of Woody showed that it can only boot from the MBR
> partition, not the root partition, i.e.
>
> boot=/dev/sda, works!
> boot=/dev/sda1, does not work!

Strange, /dev/hda1 in the form of /dev/md1 works for me.

> What has changed for newer versions of lilo?  I have been running
> Debian stable/testing/unstable for several years now without any
> problems before.

22.3 was one of the biggest changes to LILO in recent times that did have 
potential to cause breakage.  The versions after that were minor changes.

> Note also that I have a dual disk system, SCSI and IDE, therefore the
> disk=, bios= statements in lilo.conf. The disk partitioning tools, such as
> cfdisk requires both the SCSI disk and the IDE disk to have at least
> one partition with the boot flag set. Is this really necessary?

No.  You don't really need any boot flags to be set.

> Does the install=menu stuff have anything to do with the crash?

No.  It's the default action anyway...

> Maybe grub is better with respect to error recovery?

If your hardware fails to badly that Linux programs can't fix it then grub vs 
LILO is not an issue.


Russell Coker


PS  Let's move this to debian-user.



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