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Re: sarge/woody upgrade - boot problem



On Mar 01 2007, Ron Johnson wrote:
> On 03/01/07 09:48, Arlie Stephens wrote:

> > 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. 

> I googled for "linux boot only LI" and got some results.

Ah - you must have half recognized the symptoms. The link you gave
does indeed look like it's describing my problem. That also confirms
that LILO was indeed what I had on this system - probably because it
was the default for woody. (I've an idea that grub is the preferred
boot loader for more recent debian systems, since that's what I found
on all the systems here that were first installed as sarge or etch.)

> Do you have a live CD anywhere?  Or a bootable DOS floppy disk?

I'll make one tonight, and try re-installing LILO. 
Then I'll doubtless be on to the next problem, but it's a stage in the
right direction. Thank you very much. 

> http://www.faqs.org/docs/lnag/lnag_lilo.html#LILO_stops

-- 
Arlie

(Arlie Stephens	                              arlie@worldash.org)



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