Re: lilo config is busted, need help fixing it
briand@aracnet.com put forth on 9/24/2010 7:42 PM:
> right now I'm thinking I've got something misconfigured, but what ??
> Running lilo manually should fix whatever's going on and it most
> certainly isn't.
Did you possibly lose your BIOS LBA configuration before the
dist-upgrade, and didn't know it? If your CMOS battery had died, which
is quite common on 4-5+ year old systems, and you rebooted the PC, when
it came back up your BIOS data would be at defaults. In this case your
disk geometry in the BIOS may have changed from say, LBA, to LARGE, or
NORMAL.
If this occurred, it "might" explain your problems. Once the system is
booted after you manually specify /dev/sda2 at the prompt, the ATA
driver may be defaulting to LBA mode. Thus, when you run lilo, it's
basing sector translation on block offsets using LBA. When you reboot,
if the BIOS is set to NORMAL (CHS) or LARGE, the translation isn't going
to match what lilo saved in the MBR or the first sector of a partition,
whichever method you use.
When you specify /dev/sda2 at the prompt, the bootloader is working with
the current BIOS translation setting and correctly finds the disk
sectors for the root filesystem. This may explain why you can
successfully boot in this manner, but not using the normal automatic
lilo boot--the sector translations may be different.
This is all a shot in the dark and I could be smoking crack. But, it
_seems_ possible given your symptoms. Check your mobo BIOS, or PCI card
disk controller BIOS, if that's what your disk is attached to, and make
sure the drive translation is set to LBA, which is likely what it was
before.
Like I said, it's a long shot...but worth checking.
--
Stan
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