Difficult thing - boot still isn´t working

Forum: HD Install
Topic: Difficult thing - boot still isn´t working
started by: Jens

Posted by Jens on May 03 2005,22:02

Hello folks,
first of all I´m somewhat unexperienced with unix, anyway I´ve always been curious, so I wanted to try it on my old notebook (486/50, 20 MB RAM, 800 HDD).
The first problem - I do have a CD-drive attached to the docking station, but I can´t boot from there, as my bios is too old. And even worse: It´s SCSI, so these bootdisks, that bypass the BIOS-problem won´t work. So I solved this problem by copying the image to the hard drive and using a bootdisk.

Then I had some trouble creating the swap partition, since the first created partition (at the beginning of the hard drive) always was my FAT16-partition with the image file on it. Creating a /dev/hda2 worked fine with DSL - however this couldn´t be made a swap partition - some error occured. Well - with some playing I could resolve this - and finally I could even install. I believe this went rather smoothly - the ext (or whatever it is called) has been installed to /dev/hda2 which is 500 MB big.

So I have the following now:

/dev/hda1: 210 MB Linux swap
/dev/hda2: 524 MB Linux ext2 (I set this to be bootable in cfdisk, but that doesn´t seem to help)
/dev/hda5: 78 (extended dos with logical drive) FAT 16 still bearing the DSL image

And then about 1 MB unpartitioned space left.

Additional information: I tried it once again and I´ll state some lines that seem to me potentially "dangerours"

While doing HD-install

cp: cannot stat '/mnt/bootimg/boot/isolinux/linux24': No such file or directory
umount: /mnt/bootimg: not mountet

While doing mkliloboot

gzip: /mnt/l1/boot/isolinux/minirt24.gz: No such file or directory
umount: /mnt/l1: not mounted
loop0: read i/o error, sector 2
EXT2-fs: unable to read superblock
Fatal: open /boot/linux24: No such file or directory

And the result is "Missing operating system" when trying to boot. Damned thing. Hopefully someone can help me

So the problem - LILO doesn´t work. Do you know, what might be the culprit? And if not - is there something like a bootdisk, that I could use? (The normal bootdisk just scans for image-files)

Regards
Jens

Posted by Jens on May 05 2005,20:59

In the mean time I found out, what´s caused the problem.
The Kernel image in the /boot directory was missing. I could bypass this by using a bootdisk of vectorlinux (www.vectorlinux.com) to boot the installed version of my DSL. Then I just copied the linux24 kernel image from the boot menu of the CD into the /boot directory - mkliloboot then worked fine.

Posted by jah_lah on May 09 2005,14:13

HI Jens,

I have the very much same situation when trying on a 486 laptop instalation, only i did it via FTP.
I've come to the same solution after running TOMSRTBT for rescue, instead of running mkliloboot, wich i thougt was broken up. I used chroot command for lilo. Then i did a copy of linux24 from another instalation and it works fine. I'm new to linux too and it took me some time to make things work out, but now it's fine.
My guess is that there is something wrong with the hd install script.