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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