-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Ok here's what I know. LILO exists on your hard drive in multiple pieces. It prints part of it's name 'LILO' as it gets to the next part. It's first stage bootloader displays the first 'L'. That is what is located in the MBR. The first stage is a measly 512< byte program. It loads the second stage which I recall can occupy the rest of the the cylinder on side of the media so it now has some room. When it is done it displays 'I'. The second stage bootloader ah.... did something. I forget. I always played in the realm of the stage one bootloader so I didn't have to go farther. Anyway, it's just not where it's supposed to be. Since your computer boots somehow you need to check that your BIOS sees hda on your primary controller as your master (or single). If you've got a second drive and it's on the primary, go make sure it's set as slave otherwise go fix it appropriately for the secondary controller. I think there is high likelyhood that your BIOS is confused about what devices exist where so the LILO bootloader isn't working. I never worked with Grub so I can't speak about it. I'll make a further assumption that you are booting from external media which *then* sees your hardware as you wanted it to. At that point Linux has stopped paying attention to your BIOS. So... go make your BIOS happy. When you ran lilo against that lilo.conf it probably worked just fine. You did check for errors too right? It came back and said "linux *" right? That's what it should have said. If it didn't then maybe something is even weirder than I expected and lilo is also confused. So just muck with your jumpers and bios. 10 to 1 that's where your problem is. And what the heck kind of fstab is that? That's just damn weird is what that is. You must be running on of those fancy Linuxes that don't talk to the hardware like it was hardware or something. That just bothers me. But I digress. Joshua Jore Minneapolis Ward 3, precinct 10 On Mon, 29 Oct 2001, Michael Glaser wrote: > I am having problems getting my new install of Red Hat 7.2 to boot > from the hard drive. I performed a pretty basic install and everything > appeared to go well. The system will only boot from the boot floppy > however. I have three drives in the system. The boot drive is an 8.4 > GB IDE drive on the primary IDE channel as hda. The other two are > newer ATA/100 drives on the IDE1 channel of a Promise/Maxtor > controller card. These are set up as hde and hdf. > > When booting from the hard drive, the floppy light comes on, and I > see a blinking underscore character in the upper left corner of the > screen. The system becomes totally unresponsive at this point. > Even when placing a boot floppy in the drive. After running lilo and > grub-install numerous times, I started to think the the master boot > sector was not being written at all. With each attempt to write a > new MBR, the results were exactly the same - only the blinking > underscore. > > Just for the hell of it, I booted with a Win95 boot disk and run fdisk > /mbr to write a new boot sector. After doing that I am now getting > the standard "Operating system is missing" error that > DOS/Windows displays when it cannot find a Win partition. I now > know that a new MBR had been written. Each time I have run either > lilo or grub-install, I still get the same message that appeared after > using the Windows boot disk to write the MBR. > > I am thinking that neither lilo nor grub is able to write the MBR for > some reason. Would anyone know why? Following is my lilo.conf, > grub.conf, and fstab files. I wouldn't think it would matter, but > previous to this install, I had the drive that is now supposed to be > my boot disk set up as a master drive on a secondary IDE channel > with lilo placed on the beginng of the drive instead of on the MBR (I > used a different drive as my primary with the NT bootloader to > either load NT or lilo --> linux ). > > Like an idiot, I upgraded the kernel with the rpm found on the Red > Hat Updates site before getting this boot problem fixed. Now when > booting with the boot disk I get a bunch of errors because the > modules for the old kernel are not on the HDD. > > If anyone can figure out what is going on, I could really use a hand. > > Thanks > Mike Glaser > > ========================= > lilo.conf > ========================= > timeout=10 > default=linux > boot=/dev/hda > map=/boot/map > install=/boot/boot.b > message=/boot/message > linear > > image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.9-7 > label=linux > initrd=/boot/initrd-2.4.9-7.img > read-only > root=/dev/hda2 > ========================= > > > ========================= > /etc/fstab > ========================= > LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1 > LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2 > none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0 > LABEL=/home /home ext3 defaults 1 2 > LABEL=/max1 /max1 ext3 defaults 1 2 > LABEL=/max2 /max2 ext3 defaults 1 2 > none /proc proc defaults 0 0 > none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0 > /dev/hda3 swap swap defaults 0 0 > /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 > noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0 > /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner,kudzu > 0 0 > ========================= > > > ========================= > /boot/grub/grub.conf > ========================= > # grub.conf generated by anaconda > # > # Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to > this file > # NOTICE: You have a /boot partition. This means that > # all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg. > # root (hd0,0) > # kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/hda2 > # initrd /initrd-version.img > # boot=/dev/hda > default=0 > timeout=10 > splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz > password --md5 xxxxxx > title Red Hat Linux (2.4.9-7) > root (hd0,0) > kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.9-7 ro root=/dev/hda2 > initrd /initrd-2.4.9-7.img > ========================= > > > > _______________________________________________ > Twin Cities Linux Users Group Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > http://www.mn-linux.org > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > https://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (OpenBSD) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iD8DBQE73fOdfexLsowstzcRAmFIAJwIUvWhI2QKz4TRjDaNqXoPN4qkKACg8cYy 7Qpdr3q64J5VjyCXhPJ8vxU= =51SQ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----