Boot process hangs after LILO completes (-12.0)

rshepard · 03-11-2008, 02:30 PM

My Sony VAIO notebook running Slackware-12.0 booted, ran, and shut down cleanly as recently as yesterday afternoon. This morning I try booting and the process hangs.

When the LILO display comes up, I press [Enter] for the default 2.6.21.5 kernel, I see Loading linux-2.6.21.5, followed by a stream of dots across the screen, then the LILO box disappears, the cursor returns on a new line, and the system sits. No hard drive activity light, nothing.

Can I re-install (or do a re-upgrade) from the distribution cdroms without losing the contents of /home and /usr/local?

What's the recommended procedure to recover from this and return the system to working?

Thanks,

Rich

C-Sniper · 03-11-2008, 02:56 PM

you can always boot from the slackware 1 cd to do maintenence. just pop it in and boot it, adn when it comes up to ask for which kernel to boot, there should be a saying that says "In a pinch you can boot your slackware using this command" use that command. it should be something like root=/dev/hda1 rdinit=ro or something. just remember to replace your hard drive placement (hda1,sda2,sda1,etc)

rshepard · 03-11-2008, 04:12 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by C-Sniper

you can always boot from the slackware 1 cd to do maintenence. just pop it in and boot it, and when it comes up to ask for which kernel to boot, there should be a saying that says "In a pinch you can boot your slackware using this command" use that command. it should be something like root=/dev/hda1 rdinit=ro or something. just remember to replace your hard drive placement (hda1,sda2,sda1,etc)

OK. I did this, booting hugesmp.s from /dev/hda6 rdinit=ro and up it came. I logged in as a user and used ssh to copy over kernel-generic-smp-2.6.21.5_smp-i686-2_slack12.0.tgz from my main workstation/server. I re-installed this kernel package, but when I tried to reboot, the system hung as before.

It's not the kernel, apparently, and the hard drive is working OK. What do I check next? As this is a new experience in my 10+ years running linux I'm at a total loss what might be wrong.

Thanks,

Rich

rshepard · 03-11-2008, 05:00 PM

Fixed it! Just for giggles, I re-ran /sbin/lilo (although I had made no changes to /etc/lilo.conf since upgrading the kernel last month). That fixed the problem.

Wouldn't have thought to do this since LILO ran to completion ... or so it seemed.

Thanks, C-Sniper,

Rich