LILO question

[Ben Beeson]

Jeff,

	Thanks for the help.  I eventually figured out that my problem was
related to installing LILO in the MBR, something I am not sure is what it was
before....  There was obviously some confusion about where LILO should find the
boot stuff.  I tried the stuff you suggested, but it may have been beyond hope
by then due to an overzealous operator <that would be me...> I ended up backing
up the files I wanted to save, and reinstalled the OS from scratch.  I also
repartitioned my disks to something that I think will be a lot more flexible in
the long run while I was at it.

	Everything is working very well now and I am also a convert to the 
'start from scratch upgrade crowd. ' 

Thanks again for your help,

Ben 

On Sat, 05 May 2001, you wrote:
> 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
> 
> 
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