[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: broken lilo ("li" only on reboot) after woody -> sarge upgrade



debian wrote:
> I've just upgraded my "store" machine (behind my firewall) from
> woody to sarge and my firewall following the instructions.  The
> store machine rebooted fine at first but then, after some tweaks to
> X, I rebooted again and the boot is hanging at "LI".

Even if you think you only tweaked X if this is your behavior there
must have been some other change to the boot sequence.  Because
changing X would not affect boot.  (And if I were changing X I would
not have rebooted personally because they are not related.)

> I can get into the machine with a woody boot CD (or a sarge netinst
> CD - but that only seems to give me a very limited shell on alt-F2)
> and with the woody boot I can mount the /dev/hda2 drive that had the
> system on it and I'm sure that with some help I can repair
> whatever's wrong with lilo.

After booting from the install disk, using alt-f2 to get to a prompt,
and mounting all of your partitions you can chroot into the old system.
Let's say you mount the old system on /target

  chroot /target /bin/bash

At that point you should have a fairly working environment.  Debug why
lilo is having problems and fix them.  Rerun lilo.

Personally I recommend grub because it is very much more dynamic at
handling these types of boot issues.  For example, at the grub boot
prompt you could edit any of your boot parameters.

> However, I'd love to have some suggestions about what I should look
> for and how best to try to get things working right again.

Just pringing "LI" and stopping is one of the standard failure modes
and done like that as a debugging indicator.  Unfortunately I forget
what it means since it has been a while since I have used lilo.  But
just the same when you chroot into the system you should be able to
figure the problem out.

> Incidentally, I followed the upgrade instructions to the letter,
> haven't knowingly switched from lilo to grub and haven't, knowingly,
> changed kernel.

You would be looking for something that you did but did not know you
did.  But not a huge deal in any case.  Boot the recover disk, mount
the system, rerun lilo and debug the problem.  You will be back up and
running soon.

Bob

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: Digital signature


Reply to: