Re: LILO bug?

[Marty <martyb@ix.netcom.com>]

Alvin Oga wrote:
> On Fri, 1 Jul 2005, Marty wrote:
>
> > In addition to the SCSI disk becoming unbootable -- the SCSI drive LED
> > flashed when LILO wrote to it; and pulling the SCSI cable (not recommended)
>
> just because the light flashed doesnt mean it was written

True, but in combination with the other evidence, it's pretty clear that
LILO wrote to the SCSI disk.  I have no alternate explanation.

> > As I mentioned before, the target partition /dev/hda1 subsequently failed to
> > boot, and removing the SCSI disk from the system bypassed the entire problem.
>
> failing to boot is NOT the same problem as problems with lilo.conf of lilo
> itself

See above.

>  
> > I don't know offhand how to map the BIOS disk numbers (0x80, 0x81, ...)
> > to the Linux disk numbers (0x300, 0x301, ...).  
>
> which may explain why you have wierd behavior if you did try those 
> whacky disk reassignment commands in lilo

That solution attempt happened after the problem appeared.  It's one
of many solutions I've tried.

> > As I pointed out before, I don't get as far as booting.  The target drive
> > hda still doesn't boot and the SCSI drive stops booting.
>
> you can boot ... anything ... even w/o "/" mounted ... you'd just get
> kernel panic or  "/" ( aka init ) not found
>
> booting sequence has nothing to do with the rootfs

IIRC in the case of /dev/hda1 the BIOS finds no bootable disk,
and in the case of the SCSI drive it fails to find the kernel.

>  
> > > 	- label theboot kernel differently, explicitly for each
> > > 	hard disk
> >
> > See above.
>
> a super important detail that you will need to do.. to prove that
> you can boot from /dev/hda or from /dev/sda
>
> 	hda  --->>
> 		image=/boot/vmlinuz-xxx
> 		label = hda-vmlinuz
>
> 	sda --->
> 		image=/boot/vmlinuz-yyy
> 		label = SDA-vmlinuz
>
> than see what is booting .. or attempting to boot

I prefer to use the BIOS to select the boot/root drive and it works fine.

>  
> > > - it's NOT possible, or extreme slim chance, lilo writes to the wrong
> > >   boot=/dev/xxx divice
> >
> > The impossible seems to be happening.  I'd entertain alternate theories.
>
> usually lilo and grub problems are misconfigured files ...
> 	or "dirty" mbr that havent been cleaned up yet

But even a "dirty MBR," if I had one, should not cause LILO to write to the wrong disk.

> > > I've seen it many times on different systems, hence the workaround.  I don't know
> > > if others can duplicate it or not, hence one of the reasons for posting.
>
>
> i do NOT wsee any problems with lilo or grub with ide vs scsi disks
> 	- and you named it... i probaby get whacko trying to boot it

I think I've seen the problem on an IDE-only system too.

Thanks for your input but there may be no point in tying up more list
bandwidth.  I'll probably just go ahead and file the bug report.