LILO question

[Jeffrey Wong]

A couple of observations and ideas that occured to me on your problem.


> 	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

Where are you trying to install lilo?  The lilo.conf you sent to the
mailing list says:
boot = /dev/sda

But the command you are using has -b /dev/sda1

I think what you want is to have lilo installed in the mbr so just remove
the -b /dev/sda1 from the lilo command.

Keep reading, theres more below

> 	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
>
<SNIP>
>
> [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)
>

lilo is complaining that the scsi disk is read-only.  The list of
filesystem refers to the individual partitions on the disk, not the disk
as a whole.  IIRC lilo just ignores the rw permissions that the mount
command reflects, as lilo works with boot records which is independant of
the actual file system.  Try this command:
ls -l /dev/sda

It should say something like this
brw-rw----   1 root     disk          8,  0 May 5 1998 sda

Of course the date will be different, but it should show a the same
permissions and probably node types.  Quick run down on what this means
for those of you who may not know.

The first letter of the permision string is b.  This means its a special
filetype, in this case a 'block device'.

The '8, 0' just before the date identifies the block device type, in this
case major type is 8, minor type is 0.  This means that the file refers to
device number 8, access point 0.  To verify that it has the right device
number, check in /proc/devices.  It should list sd for SCSI disk under
Block devices.  sda will be the lowest numbered sd device.  The access
point of 0 means the disk as whole and not a particular partition.

There are only 2 problems that I can think of that will cause the
Read-only error you got.  The first is that for some reason you don't have
write permission to /dev/sda.

The other reason is that the scsi device has been set as read-only.  This
can be done through a SCSI command being issued directly to the scsi
controller, but I have no idea how this might be done.  Some scsi
controllers allow you to access this from the scsi bios config screen.
Since you can write to the partitions on the disk, I don't think that this
is your problem.


The next thing that I can think of is the linear tag in the lilo.conf
file.  Some drive/BIOS combinations require the linear tag, but most don't
really care.  I've never heard of a drive that requires the linear tag not
be there, but that doesn't mean that they don't exist.  You could try
removing it, but if lilo won't work then it that won't be of any help.

That's all that I can think of right now, hopefully it helps

Jeff Wong