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I recently put Slackware 9.0 on an old Dell Pentium 133 with a single 1.5 GB hard drive, and the installation went without error. I split the hard drive into three partitions. The first (/dev/hda1) contains the kernel and is set to be bootable. The second(/dev/hda2) is set aside for /home, and the final partition (/dev/hda3) is a 128 MB swap file. My lilo.conf file in /etc/ includes the following:
The system will not boot on its own. I don't think LILO even starts, because the first 'L' character isn't even printed. My screen shows some BIOS information, then a blinking cursor, and then nothing else happens. If I disable booting from a floppy in the BIOS, then I get the message "No boot signature in partition". Luckily, I made boot disks during installation, and they allow me to boot Linux.
LILO is installed, and I did run the lilo command, as root, without error. It seems to be that I just don't have any partition set to active, but fdisk does indicate that /dev/hda1 is bootable. So, what do you think it could be? How can I get Linux to boot on its own?
Well, I did do that, and still nothing. But I have a question related to that. Doesn't the line "boot = /dev/hda" in my lilo.conf indicate that I want it in the MBR? And then when I run lilo, shouldn't it then be installed in the MBR? Or does liloconfig do something additional?
Maybe the BIOS is confused by having a bootloader in the MBR and a partition set as "active" - try taking away the "active" status of /dev/hda1 and let the BIOS find the bootloader in the MBR.
that doesnt mean nothing cause i get
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
LILO
üLILOu1^Í
and everythings ok with me
when you run liloconfig, and you do begin he will ask you if you want to use mbr, disk or superblock (not sure what this is). have you selected MBR, configurated and run LILO. it should work. it worked for me
luxitan, I have tried liloconfig and it's just not working for me. But checking the MBR (with dd) shows that at least something related to LILO is being written there, even if it doesn't work.
Skyline, I tried what you recommended, and it doesn't work as well. Setting boot to hda1 would put it in the first partition (where the kernel is located), rather than the MBR, right? Then wouldn't I need some other bootloader in the MBR?
Something's seriously wrong here - it appears that LILO really is writing, and I have the correct configuration, right? Is there some other major step that I'm missing?
Setting boot to hda1 would put it in the first partition (where the kernel is located), rather than the MBR, right? Then wouldn't I need some other bootloader in the MBR?
No - the BIOS would simply load the partition table, then find the active partition and load the boot sector of that partition - if LILO was installed via boot=/dev/hda1 then it would be loaded from the boot sector of that partition - Conversly - if LILO was installed in the MBR it would simply ignore the active partition but unfortunately there's still appears to be problems with this also - As Canon mentioned, has anything recently been booted from the MBR of that drive?
SpecialK, It seems that the problem has to do with your BIOS setting and your harddrive.
Old BIOSes sometimes hard to support or detect harddrive that is more than 1024 MB.
First, set your BIOS to its default setting, then boot your linux.
If that doesnt work, set your BIOS to detect your harddrive by auto mode and boot again.
If that doenst work as well, my last suggestion is to force LBA 32 during reinstallation
I was having problems getting LILO to boot of my SCSI hd.. thats all i had was a seagate cheetah 9.1gb scsi and an IDE cd-rom... kept getting the L 99 99 (not even LI) ..after taking off the bootable of the partition that worked... why is that? using either mbr or superblock with the partition marked as bootable caused errors.
I really appreciate all of the help, and I think that the problem has been resolved (sort of).
In the BIOS I have three settings for the boot sequence: Diskette First, CD-ROM First, and Hard Disk Only. When this whole thing started, if I selected "Diskette First", then I would get nothing but a blinking cursor after the BIOS loaded. If I selected "Hard Disk Only", then I would get the message "No boot signature in partition." I guess somewhere along the way, with some combination of settings, I managed to correctly load LILO in to the MBR. But it still wouldn't work, until I decided to switch the Boot Sequence back to "Hard Disk Only" (I had it on Diskette First).
So now, Linux loads, but only under "Hard Disk Only" booting. Does anyone have an idea why?
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