LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Alan Kennington <akenning@dog.topology.org>
  To  : LinuxSA <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Tue, 13 Jun 2000 20:20:49 +0930

no boot at all -- I give up!

After working away for a few days re-making various kernels
on two different machines (and having success on a third one,
updating to 2.2.16), I now have a problem which I just don't understand,
and It's _very frustrating.
The most frustrating problems are the ones where you _know_ that
you have done the right thing, and the computer is still doing
something that is impossible.
Well, I've run out of ideas.


Problem:
I re-boot, and the BIOS just doesn't see anything on drive C
(/dev/hda) to boot at all. It just goes straight to the CD-ROM.
Or if I tell the BIOS to boot from C only, it just stops and
says there's nothing there.

Last time I had a similar problem, it turned out that I needed to
mark one of the partitions as active - the partition with the
lilo boot sector.
But this time, the BIOS doesn't even get that far.
And the right partition is marked active anyway.

I've re-run "lilo" a dozen times, sometimes with
/dev/hda1 as boot partition, sometime /dev/hda.

"fdisk" shows this:

=========================================
Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 788 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *         1         1      8001   83  Linux
/dev/hda2             2        17    128520   82  Linux swap
/dev/hda3            18       788   6193057+  83  Linux
=========================================

/etc/lilo.conf has this:

=========================================
# LILO Konfigurations-Datei
# Start LILO global Section
# Modified by ak, 13 June 2000.
boot=/dev/hda
#compact       # faster, but won't work on all systems.
vga = normal    # force sane state
read-only
prompt
timeout=200
# End LILO global Section
#
image = /boot/vmlinuz
  root = /dev/hda3
  label = linux

# Original kernel.
image = /boot/vmlinuz.orig
  root = /dev/hda3
  label = linux.orig

# 2.3.99 kernel with atm.
image = /boot/vmlinuz-atm2
  root = /dev/hda3
  label = atm2 
=========================================

The re-boot after re-building a kernel has worked fine before
on this machine.

By the way, I'm writing this e-mail from the machine which
is affected. So everything works except that it doesn't boot
with assistance from a bootable CD-ROM or floppy.

Could anyone please tell me what other things I can try either
with "fdisk" and/or "lilo" or some other tool?
I get the impression that the magic word in the MBR must be wrong,
but re-writing the partition table to the MBR doesn't seem
to fix anything.

Cheers,
Alan Kennington.

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