So, I've got Mandrake installed, and it's pretty nice. Anyway, for some reason, my Lilo is goofy I believe. Here's the basic config:

(1) 18 gig SCSI drive
(1) 40 gig IDE drive (master, 1st channel)
(1) CDROM (master, 2nd channel)

When I boot the computer, everything seems fine, and then before I get any LILO menu or anything, all I see is "LI" up in the very top right corner of the screen. It is white, on black background.

However, when I pop in a floppy boot disk, everything boots as usual.

I can't figure out how to make it boot properly; I want to boot from /dev/sda1 (where my / partition is), and that's what the floppy does, but the actual installed Lilo on the machine just doesn't seem to work, and it used to. I have tried reformatting with the Mandrake CD (with their formatting utility) as well as installing Red Hat 7.1 and formatting with that (in their installer, for some reason my Red Hat 7.1 CD *ALWAYS* freezes the computer when installing the packages I've chosen...I think that is a result of a bad CD more than anything, though).

If anyone can help, I would really appreciate it.
Thanks!

Thought this might be helpful. When I installed RH on a scsi drive, it wouldn't boot. I didnt have lilo installed, so I don't know about getting a li in the top of the screen (!), but to make the drive bootable I had to do a low level format using the scsi controllers bios utility. No other format worked.

Also, other people are going to answer this and they might need more info, such as where you installed lilo to (MBR?), what Mandrake distro exactly, what's in your /etc/lilo.conf, you said sda1 was / - is this your only linux partition, or do you have a /boot partition?

My 2c

glj

I'll try the Low Level format trick tonight, thanks for the idea! I assume that my CD (it's a Gateway 6400 server...grrr for stupid Gateway, but hooray for getting the deal that I got on it!! , will take care of that for me, or I can just go into the utility while it's doing the Hardware check at the beginning.

I'm running Mandrake 8, got the CD from Cheapbytes (ditto with the RH 7.1 cds that seem to hang...).

here is the content of /etc/lilo.conf:


boot=/dev/sda1
map=/boot/map
install=/boot/boot.b
vga=ask
default=linux
keytable=/boot/us.klt
lba32
prompt
timeout=100
message=/boot/message
menu-scheme=wb:bw:wb:bw
image=/boot/vmlinuz-smp
label=linux
root=/dev/sda1
initrd=/boot/initrd-smp.img
append=" quiet"
vga=788
read-only
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label=linux-up
root=/dev/sda1
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
read-only
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label=failsafe
root=/dev/sda1
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append=" failsafe"
read-only
ther=/dev/fd0
label=floppy
unsafe

And yep, I do have a /boot, should that be what I'm doing? The partition info is as follows:

40 gig Maxtor IDE:
/backup (10gig)
/swap (400mb)
/scratch (remainder of drive)

18 gig IBM SCSI:
/ (250mb)
/var (4gig)
/usr (3gig)
/home (remainder of drive)


I just tried running /sbin/lilo after having read another thread (4300 has the exact same problem I'm describing, and he "fixed" it by going to another HD...which clearly isn't an option in this case) and this is what it said...

Warning: /dev/sda1 is not on the first disk
Added linux *
Added linux-up
Added failsafe
Added floppy

Sadly, I don't know where Lilo would have been installed, I'd assume whatever the default was for a SCSI drive, since when I first did it, I didn't know enough to be playing around with too many options. If there's a way to check, let me know, and I'll be happy to do that too. Thanks for the quick reply!!!

Many people have had that problem... and that thing with the "not on the first disk" is exactly what I had too on RH 7.1


I eventually figured it out myself


The hard drive you are installing linux on(at least the boot partition) MUST be in the Primary Master jumper slot.... or it won't work.... thats what fixed it on mine

That's annoying if I can't have it all on the SCSI drive...sheesh. I'm going to try toasting the drive and starting over from scratch, as there's nothing on this machine that I can't lose anyway...but, very annoying. The thing is, I swear that it worked this way for a while (IE, I had the IDE drive in there, and the SCSI drive, and everything was just ducky...penguiny?

Thx.

Ian

So, last night, I tried everything I could think of, did formats of both drives, reinstalled, nothing worked. I'm starting to think that DragonClaw is right, and I *HAVE* to install boot to the IDE drive??? That has to be the stupidest thing ever! Here I have this wicked fast SCSI 10,000RPM drive, and I just put some POS IDE drive in there to backup (via a cron job) my home directory and some extra storage, and now I have to boot off it??? That is just plain stupid!! I want to talk to Linus!!! Or at least, the LILO folks. I think it's time to RTFM (the long LILO readme) and maybe try to get in touch with someone that built that sucker...grrr

Surely if that was true it would mean that you couldn't install to a box that had only SCSI drives in it?

glj

P.S. My /boot is on the second scsi drive (sdb1), swap on sbd5 and / on sbd6

I agree, unless the system had ONLY SCSI drives in it. However, I have new hopes, I'm going to try this tonight, I found it from SUSE's site (I wish there was someone home now to pop my floppy boot disk out of the drive so I could try this remotely)...

boot=/dev/sda
disk=/dev/sda
bios=0x80

Apparently, that's the way to make Lilo think that the SCSI drive is the first drive in the system, because since it can't actually read out of the bios's settings, it just assumes that the Primary IDE master is the boot drive (VERY STUPID!!! and just tries to boot that...anyway I'm going to try it tonight, and will post my results!
Thanks to everyone that has been helping!

Ian