Post-install LILO issues
 

Hello all. First post. Thanks in advance for any help.

Last night I installed RH9 on old AMD K6-2 box. This machine was previously a Win2k/Mandrake8 box with LILO as the bootloader. In the RH installer, I picked LILO instead of GRUB because of my previous experience with it.

After the clean install, RH seems not to have overwritten the MBR with updates to LILO. Everything is as it was for my old Win2k/Mandrake8 setup, and nothing works. Also, I wish RH would have prompted me to make a floppy bootdisk, but alas, no. So I *think* RH9 has installed properly, but I simply can't boot to it.

I tried booting from the RH9 full disc and the RH9 boot ISO (which I downloaded separately), but neither seems to get past the language/keyboard selection phase now. It's strange. Any ideas? Thanks.

grub will let you enter a boot comand manually so if you know where your kernel image is for you're new system then you might be able to get it to boot. I've gotten myself out of a few tight spots using the slackware install disc in rescue mode. it will boot and then drop you to a shell where you can try to mount your RH partition and start figuring things out. good luck

LILO has command line parameters as well, and I tried some of those, like "linux rescue" and "linux root=/dev/hda2" but neither worked. How would I specify the location of my kernel, either in LILO or GRUB? In all honesty, the "kernel" baffles me. :)

I figured I wouldn't be such a helpless n00b, so Google brought me to this page: http://www.comptechdoc.org/os/linux/...nux_hllkr.html

However, I'm still hazy as to how to figure out where the kernel is (and what it's named) on my newly installed system.

well the exact syntax for the command is not so fresh in my mind but typically the kernel image is located in /boot somewhere. it will either be initrd-2.4.20.img(or what ever your kernel version is) or vmlinuz-2.4.20. fortunatley it is usually linked to "/boot/initrd.img" or "/boot/vmlinuz" respectively so you don't need to know your kernel ver. RH9 uses initrd.img i think so if you can tell lilo that "image=/boot/initrd.img" with your command that might do it. if not try "image=/boot/initrd/initrd.img".
definalty go check out some of the docs for lilo to help get the command right.

Thanks ocularbob. I should be able to handle getting the LILO syntax down, booting into RH, and editing /etc/lilo.conf. You don't need to bother with hunting down the docs. Thanks again.

i made a mistake in the previos post but fixed it so please refresh and read it again. sorry

Red Hat 9 not only rewrites the boot sector on installation (unless you specifically tell it not to) but it also creates a boot disk (unless you specifically tell it not to).

It sounds like you have some bogus CDs, possibly virus-infected or backdoored and certainly not official Red Hat products... but in any case, RH9 is *not* correctly installed on your machine. I just did a RH9 install and I have a freshly rewritten MBR and a 3.5" boot floppy right here in front of me.

I'd burn that system down to the bare metal and get some fresh CDs, were I you!

what he said

Problem fixed (but in a different way)
 

Well, I fixed the problem, but not through Red Hat. ;) I know this is a Red Hat forum, so I won't go evangelizing another distro, but the long and the short of it is that I wanted installed MEPIS, a Debian-based, bootable CD-type distro in the vein of Knoppix (but with a better install to HD). [mepis.org]

The install of RH9 was all wrong, you're correct. The problem may have been that my computer overheated in the middle of it. :rolleyes: I forgot to plug in my floppy drive, which connected power to the fan. I thought I took care of this *before* the RH install, but I can't remember--I was tired that night! :D

Anyway, thanks for the replies.