LILO question
Ben Beeson
beesond001 at hawaii.rr.com
Sat May 5 02:35:15 PDT 2001
Aloha all,
I just loaded a new CD of Linux and I am having a little bit of trouble
with LILO now. When I boot from the hard drive, I get a "LIL-" prompt instead
of "LILO:" The boot floppy that I created works fine, and so far it appears
that the rest of my files are intact. I can even boot a kernel on the
harddrive. I just can't boot via the harddrive only...
I checked several resources on the web, and I figured out that "LIL-"
means that the descriptor table is corrupt. "This can either be caused by a
geometry mismatch or by moving /boot/map without running the map installer."
Whatever that means???? (See
http://sdb.suse.de/en/sdb/html/kgw_lilo_errmsg.html for a very brief
description....)
I read the LILO user's guide and decided that I needed to rerun lilo as
"/sbin/lilo -b /dev/sda1" to recreate the map file, but I still get stuck at
"LIL-" upon boot.
Next I ran /sbin/lilo -v -v -v and captured the output. Here is what
I got back...
***** This is the standard output of lilo -v -v -v *****
[root at a24b94n83client89 /boot]# cat lilo.log
LILO version 21.4-4, Copyright (C) 1992-1998 Werner Almesberger
'lba32' extensions Copyright (C) 1999,2000 John Coffman
Reading boot sector from /dev/sda
Merging with /boot/boot.b
Device 0x0801: BIOS drive 0x80, 255 heads, 1116 cylinders,
63 sectors. Partition offset: 1 sectors.
***** This is the standard error of lilo -v -v -v *****
[root at a24b94n83client89 /boot]# cat lilo.logerr
Fatal: read /dev/sda: Read-only file system
I wanted to check the LILO parameters recorded in lilo.log to the
values returned in fdisk for the drive geometries and this is what 'fdisk -l'
says...
[root at a24b94n83client89 /]# /sbin/fdisk -l
kernel version 131602
Disk /dev/sda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 1116 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 2 16064+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 3 385 3076447+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 386 402 136552+ 82 Linux swap
/dev/sda4 403 1116 5735205 83 Linux
Disk /dev/sdb: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 1116 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 1 17 136521 82 Linux swap
/dev/sdb2 18 502 3895762+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdb3 503 987 3895762+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdb4 988 1116 1036192+ 5 Extended
/dev/sdb5 988 1116 1036161 83 Linux
So far, I think everything is OK, but I am still not sure. 'mount'
returns the following...
[root at a24b94n83client89 /]# mount
/dev/sda2 on / type ext2 (rw)
none on /proc type proc (rw)
/dev/sda1 on /boot type ext2 (rw)
/dev/sda4 on /home type ext2 (rw)
/dev/sdb2 on /opt type ext2 (rw)
/dev/sdb3 on /usr type ext2 (rw)
/dev/sdb5 on /var type ext2 (rw)
none on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
automount(pid669) on /misc type autofs (rw,fd=5,pgrp=669,minproto=2,maxproto=3)
Now I am really confused because the lilo.logerr says the disk it is
looking at is Read Only, but 'mount' says that same disk is mounted
read-write...
I can't figure this one out, so before I uninstall LILO completely
(/sbin/lilo -u) and then reinstall LILO, if anyone has any other ideas for how
to go about fixing it, or if there is anything in particular that I should watch
out for, I'd like to know???
Thanks in advance,
Ben
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