[clug] Let's close the year with some LILO weirdness

Gary Woodman antigramp at yahoo.com.au
Mon Dec 27 23:22:56 GMT 2004


Greetings, and compliments of the season!

I'm stuck with a LILO problem (posting from Knoppix :-), and I'm
seeking some suggestions from the CLUG gurus.

The HDD in my main computer, a Compaq laptop, is dying; if I put it in
the fridge for an hour, I can use if for half an hour before the HDD
overheats and locks up, to be retired for another spell in the fridge.

I immediately turned to my media-manager box, an old govvy-clearance
Ipex like everyone was selling at the markets a year or two ago. It has
two disparate 10G HDDs, a Seagate and a Quantum on hda and hdb
respectively, and an Acer CD-RW on hdc. On hdb is nothing but data
(currently backups from my laptop), on hda is two 2G partitions at hda2
and hda5, swap, and a 5G /home.

For some months this box has run Xandros 2.0, a very nice Debian-based
commercial Linux that I had from the cover disk of PC Authority
magazine; however, I used it pretty irregularly. When I started it on
Boxing Day, to act as a backup target and to take over Internet access
duties from my terminal laptop, I found that since the last time I was
at this box, Mozilla has taken to segfaulting and can't be used.
Further, Xandros Networks was down over the Christmas break (it's back
now), leaving me unable to enjoy or upgrade Mozilla at a crucial time.
Damn!

Coincidentally, I had a copy of the latest APC magazine (that Santa
brought for the geeks in the family) with ISOs for Fedora on the cover
disk. I haven't tried Fedora before, and with the time, the resources,
and a need, it seemed like a good opportunity to investigate.

My sons burned the CDs for me, media checked out fine, the install went
smoothly, and the machine rebooted. But instead of starting Fedora, I
was staring at, not a menu, but a grub> prompt! That wasn't supposed to
happen! I quickly lost interest in GRUB (two OS on this box and it
won't boot either of them), and that's a bit of a sub-topic which
CLUGgers could address if they felt like it: what did Fedora's GRUB do
(or not do), and how would I proceed in the purest Fedoric way?

Note: this box is currently unable to boot from HDD. A recipe for
Knoppix! First I updated the GRUB control file (on hda5, where I
installed Fedora), but that didn't give me a menu or otherwise affect
GRUB. I gave up then, resolving to return to LILO, for which I had a
perfectly good conffile on hda2, generated by Xandros and in use for
months. I edited that to include the image on hda5 (pasted in down
below), and attempted to write LILO's boot loader with the usual 'lilo
-v -t -r /mnt', only to see this:
Fatal: stat /dev/hda: No such file or directory

Say that again? What is it saying? Of course manually issuing a 'stat
/dev/hda' gives the following, clearly not 'No such file...':

  File: `/dev/hda'
  Size: 0               Blocks: 0          IO Block: 4096   block
special file
Device: 100h/256d       Inode: 37          Links: 1     Device type:
3,0
Access: (0600/brw-------)  Uid: (    0/    root)   Gid: (    0/   
root)
Access: 2003-10-02 19:57:10.000000000 -0400
Modify: 1998-05-05 16:32:26.000000000 -0400
Change: 2004-08-22 01:22:45.000000000 -0400

Something weird happening here. Just for completeness, I tried lilo
from Xandros' rescue mode, and ditto Fedora. They also produce the same
error from the same lilo.conf, which implies a problem in my config (or
my understanding).

Seeking enlightenment. All suggestions welcome!

Gary


My lilo.conf (on hda2, the Xandros partition):

boot=/dev/hda
install=/boot/cboot.b
message=/boot/splash.lilo
timeout=50
map=/boot/map
prompt
fix-table
lba32
read-only
disk=/dev/hda bios=0x80
disk=/dev/hdb bios=0x81
image=/vmlinuz
        label=[]s_Desktop_2.0
        vga=0xf04
        root=/dev/hda2
        initrd=/boot/initrd-2.4.22-x1.gz
        append="rw acpi=on "
image=/vmlinuz
        label=Safe_Video_Mode
        vga=0xf04
        root=/dev/hda2
        initrd=/boot/initrd-2.4.22-x1.gz
        append="3 rw acpi=on "
image=/vmlinuz
        label={}ure_(Expert)
        vga=normal
        root=/dev/hda2
        initrd=/boot/initrd-2.4.22-x1.gz
        append="single rw acpi=on "
image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.9-1.667
 label=Fedora
 vga=normal
 root=/dev/hda5
 initrd=/boot/initrd-2.6.9-1.667.img


		
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