Any way to boot?
 

Hi guys,

I'll try to explain this without too much humiliation...

I installed Debian on our notebook yesterday, and it went fine.

Today I installed it on the second hard drive in our desktop. I'd read that GRUB was better than LILO, so when the installer asked, "Do you want to install LILO?", I said "no," figuring I'd install GRUB later.

Then, when it asked if I wanted to make a boot floppy, I also said "no," because I'd made one when I installed on the notebook.

Now, I can't boot, of course. The partition's "bootable," but there's no boot loader (right?). The floppy causes a kernel panic, because (as I now know) it's configured for a different system.

I can boot from CD and get to a root shell, but what do I do then? Can I install GRUB (or lacking that, LILO) from there? Or make a boot floppy for the new install? Or must I start all over?

Thanks for your help. (I know we'll all laugh about this someday---that is, I'll laugh too, not just you.)

Cheers, Ander

boot from cdrom to your root shell and do
lilo -b /dev/hda this will install lilo in the mbr

apt-get install lilo if it's not installed

You can also install Grub by typing "grub-install /dev/hd?", just make sure grub.conf is configured properly, and that Grub is installed.

Okay, I tried it. I got:

knoppix@ttyp0[knoppix]$ sudo lilo -b /dev/hdb
/etc/lilo.conf: Permission denied
knoppix@ttyp0[knoppix]$ sudo lilo -b /dev/hdb
Unrecognized token "! Please edit /etc/lilo.conf before running lilo!" at or above line 20 in file '/etc/lilo.conf'

And if I do manage to install LILO on my Linux h/d's MBR, how do I run LILO without a boot floppy?

Thanks...

switch to root with su
then do those commands.
You could always install lilo on the primary master, probably hda, and then add all your other OS's.

Yes, I opened a session as root and used that command, and that's the message I got.

Well, this isn't working. Guess I'll have to do the reinstall. Thanks anyway.