sarge/woody upgrade - boot problem
Hi Folks,
I'm hoping the collective wisdom of this list can point me at the
right TFM. I'm also somewhat inclined to vent.
The problem - I tried to upgrade an elderly system from woody to
sarge. Now it doesn't boot. I suspect the upgrade ate the master boot
record - but I don't even know the right terminology to figure out
what to search for, to try to confirm my suspicions.
The behavior - hangs during boot, almost immediately after noting the
absence of a bootable CD. It prints 2 characters before the hang: LI.
My suspicion - LI stands for LILO, and the "upgrade" disagreed with
whatever I *had* been using (LILO)? wanted me on something else (GRUB?)
and proceeded to make a mixed muddle that won't boot.
What I don't know - how many different systems are available to manage
what-one-boots from in debian/linux, what they are called, what the generic
term might be (so as to search for the above information), how to
recover from this having been trashed (obviously start by booting from
CD or floppy, but then what?), and which one is likely to give me the
least trouble.
Venting now - guess why I switched from red hat to debian? Yep, it was
the absence of upgrades making my system unbootable. I figured I was
better off with Debian's near inability to get X configurations right
- and the upgrade trashed *that* again too - then with Red Hat's habit
of making my system only semi-bootable after every kernel upgrade.
I realize woody is throughly obsolete, but damn it, I'm trying to get
*off* it.
Final post script - this really looks like a hardware problem, and I
know systems sometimes develop issues that don't show until they are
rebooted (or power cycled). That's one reason I rebooted the system
once while it was still on woody. Since I encountered no problems
then, it's pretty clear the upgrade *is* the culprit, in spite
of appearances.
--
Arlie
(Arlie Stephens arlie@worldash.org)
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