iB::Topic::hdinstall -- lilo fails

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Topic: hdinstall -- lilo fails, What's going wrong here?

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longship

Group: Members
Posts: 9
Joined: Nov. 2004

Posted: Nov. 30 2004,00:25

Running DSL on PII-400 (Deschutes) on Asus P2B-F,
twin Fujitsu 2.5 HD (/dev/hda, /dev/hdb)

Run 'sudo dsl-hdinstall'

Select 'hda1' (partitioned as bootable, type 82 = Linux,
size=approx 300Mb)

Select install with multi-user logins= y

System goes through the whole process, no apparent error
messages until:

"Do you want to run mkliloboot now?"
Answered 'y'

The following was printed on terminal:
==================================
/dev/root on / type ext2 (rw)
/dev/scd0 on /cdrom type iso9660 (ro)
/dev/cloop on /KNOPPIX type iso9660 (ro)
/ramdisk on /ramdisk type tmpfs (rw,size=199644k)
/proc/bus/usb on /proc/bus/usb type usbdevfs (rw,devmode=0666)
/dev/hda1 on /mnt/hd type ext2 (rw)
Setting up boot loader (LILO) into the master boot record..
Warning: '/proc/partitions' does not exist, disk scan bypassed
Added Linux *
Skipping /vmlinuz.old
}The lilo boot installation process is finished.
You must reboot to continue the final stage of the hard drive install.
==========================================

[Q] Is this normal?

Upon boot, lilo says:

L 99 99 99 99 99 99 99... (etc)

It should be "LILO (etc)"

Apparently I've got something wrong

[Q] Where do I go from here?

[Q] Is there any way to boot the installation from the CD
so I can fix 'lilo.conf' or MBR or whatever?

Thanks.

longship

Group: Members
Posts: 9
Joined: Nov. 2004

Posted: Nov. 30 2004,01:27

DSL version is 0.8.2

SaidinUnleashed Offline

Group: Members
Posts: 1428
Joined: Mar. 2004

Posted: Nov. 30 2004,04:23

Try using fdisk to make a new mbr and try installing again.

I'd explain it to ya, but it's just as easy for you to use Google as it is for me, and I can't remember off the top of my head.

Or if you are using an NT based version of windows, you can teach ntldr to boot linux. Info about doing this here.

Thats what I do on my box at home, because lilo sucks.

Grub > ntldr > lilo

-J.P.

--------------
They say if you play a Microsoft CD backwards, you hear satanic messages. That's nothing, cause if you play it forwards, it installs Windows.

Unleash the power of the TILDE~~~

longship

Group: Members
Posts: 9
Joined: Nov. 2004

Posted: Nov. 30 2004,04:31

Solved my own problem...

But for those of you having similar issues with hdinstall here's
a quick answer to my question.

As has been pointed out in other messages in this forum:

LILO has problems when the drive geometry doesn't fit
its notion of how the drive should look. In my case,
I had configured the drives in the BIOS using "normal"
mode, which is my usual practice. Unfortunately LILO
doesn't agree which is why it wasn't booting.

1. I set the BIOS to AUTO configure the hard drive.
I have no idea what it does, but I suspect that
this configures the drive in LBA mode.
2. I repartitioned the drive (using Linux-BBC since
DSL has a broken "fdisk" which cannot read some
drives). I made a 300Mb partition (making sure that
it was within 1024 sectors of the beginning of the
drive). I set the BOOT FLAG on this partition.
I also set up a SWAP partition and two other
partitions for possibly another Linux boot.
3. I ran dsl-hdinstall (after booting DSL).

Voila! LILO booted perfectly and I'm now on DSL on the
hard drive.

Cool!