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Re: Can't boot anything....



On Wed, 2003-06-25 at 07:11, Kjetil Kjernsmo wrote:
> On 24 Jun 2003, Alex Malinovich wrote:
--snip--
> > The 01's that are being printed to the screen
> >are coming from lilo, so the HD is actually booting. 
> 
> That's very interesting. 
--snip--
> I went over the HD, and it seems nothing is lost there, and all partitions
> mounted fine. 

Great! So there's nothing to worry about as far as losing data is
concerned. Even if it does turn out to be a hardware problem you can
just swap hard drives and be back up and running in no time.

--snip--
> >Finally, if/when you manage to get the system booting, then find a good
> >Linux boot disk (Knoppix CD, boot floppy, etc), and re-run lilo.
> 
> Yeah, I reinstalled the kernel that was working before this happened last
> night, but it didn't make any difference. 

Assuming that you were using the Debian Way to make kernel images, upon
installation of a new image, the old one is automatically backed up and
an entry is placed in lilo.conf called LinuxOLD. This allows you to boot
the previous kernel if there's a problem with the new one.

> However, and I think this is a lead:
> 
> On installation of the new kernel, it complains about "/boot/mbr.b" and
> tells me to install the mbr package. I don't remember the exact wording,
> but I guess the wizards who wrote it will recognize... :-) This was the
> stuff I didn't understand the last time around. However, dpkg -l says that
> I _have_ mbr installed, so perhaps something has happened to just my MBR?
> It is particulary interesting since you mention that the "01 "'s are
> coming from LILO. 
> 
> Does this mean anything to you....?  

If the only problem is that your MBR got wiped out, just re-running lilo
should fix the problem. First try "lilo -v" as root. This will just
re-run lilo and show you what it's doing in the process. Keep an eye out
for error messages. I BELIEVE that lilo will automatically write the
result to the MBR to begin with. If it doesn't, you can try "lilo -vM
/dev/hda" (replace hda with whatever device your HD is actually on). If
you want to reinstall the mbr package, just run "apt-get install
--reinstall mbr". Assuming that the MBR being corrupted was the only
problem, this should take care of everything.

-- 
Alex Malinovich
Support Free Software, delete your Windows partition TODAY!
Encrypted mail preferred. You can get my public key from any of the
pgp.net keyservers. Key ID: A6D24837

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