LILO Boot Problem

ainran

I recently went and upgraded my linux distro from mandrake 8.1 to mandrake 9.1 (the one off this months linux format) My comp is a dell inspiron dule booting between mandrake and XP pro. The install went fine however when the the install was finished and the computer tried to boot it became aparant that lilo had taken a nose dive and now doesnt work at all. I'm getting

LILO:
00
00
01
00

Followed by other nonscence chars. Since i dont have a linux boot disk i cant load up and reset lilo (not that i'm sure how to do that anyhow) Also i'm running XP so i cant start that from a boot disk, or can i?


A friend of mine told me to fdisk the master boot record. But i am a little wary about doing this (can seriously f**k up you machine) besides i'm not convinced it will work... what effect would this have? (fdisk /mbr - usually used when clearing boot viruses)

Any help would be appreciated...

Cake Fiend

Werl, if you fdisk your mbr, XP should grab it back and you'll at least be able to boot XP.
The moral of the story here kids, is always make a linux boot disk in case your bootloader goes tits up.

BTW, to reload lilo, run /sbin/lilo

niallb

Boot off the Mandrake 9.1 CD 1
It's a linux boot disk :-)

press F2 or F1 whichever tells you it will give you more options.

If you know what partition you installed to
you can boot it with
linux root=/dev/hda5 or whatever.
Login and run
lilo.

Alternatively,
Select Rescue.

It even has a menu item to reinstall a boot loader for you.

If you've any probs, post back.

NiallB

Capt'n Midnight

Distro - Knoppix

had to Fdisk /mbr to get back into windows so the first 446 bytes trashed.
tried dd if=/mnt/hda1/mbr of=/dev/hda bs=1 count=446
gives 1 followed by a load of 9's
used gpart, cfdisk or was it sfdisk and -c -h -s to fix qtparted changing the CHS on the HDD and original problem of /dev/hda2 kept hiding itself (changed partition type)

so tnow trying to get Lilo setup again.
If I boot from the CD then go into /mnt/hda3/sbin and run
lilo -C "/mnt/hda3/etc/lilo.conf"
it fails 'cos /etc and /boot are still on the readonly CD

I've tried root=/dev/hda3 and /home=/dev/hd3 - both still boot from the CD

any other way I've tried to boot seems to load the CD first.
is there any other way of installing lilo on the MBR ?
is there any other way of booting from /dev/hda3

niallb

If you can boot from the CD and mount all your filesystems under /mnt/hda3 you can do it.

Are your ondisk /etc and /boot also on hda3?
If not you need to mount them in the right locations on the tree:
E.G. if hda1 is boot you should run
mount -t whatever /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda3/boot
(After making sure hda3 is mounted and hda1 isn't).

Then cd /mnt/hda3 and type in
chroot /mnt/hda3 bin/bash

You'll now be CHange ROOTed into the context of your ondisk install,
so just typing lilo will install as per /etc/lilo.conf
which is now your real /etc.

Problems may occur if Knoppix has used the ide-scsi driver for your hard disks,
giving you sda instead of hda, but it's unlikely.

NiallB

Capt'n Midnight

Thanks
No joy with chroot - can see how it's supposed to work but /dev/scd0 just won't let go

[edit]errors - in case someone searches
bin/bash: dev/null: Permission denied
[/edit]

in the end it was boot in to dos prompt and
loadlin.exe linux26 root=/dev/hda3 rw
and then run the lilo config off the menu again