I install LILO; alls fine, but at some point LILO will only boot up to "LIL" and I have to use the rescue disk, uninstall it twice, then reinstall it (yes, it's happened that many times).

Here is my setup:
I used to have it setup to where /boot/map was on hdb3, but now I got ntfs-3g and put it on hda1.

randomly failing ususally points to hardware errors.
have you something unusual in your lilo.conf? what does lilo-v output?

have a look at the official lilo site http://lilo.go.dyndns.org/ ,too and see if your problem persists with the newest version.

Here is my lilo.conf

here is the output of 'lilo -v'

I'll try updating to 22.8 if it's stable enough

might want to rem the compact call "#compact" can cause strange problems.

LILO works by saving the disk address of your kernel at LILO time. When you boot your system, LILO doesn't need to know how to access filesystems like ext2, reiserfs, etc. The problem is, sometimes your kernel can move. Some filesystems are more likely than others to move things around in the process of self-defragging and managing space.

I think you're experiencing a normal consequence of how LILO works. I found it almost intolerable with JFS, an intermittent problem with reiserfs and almost never a problem with ext2/3.

I would continue using the compact option as it increases booting speed a lot and I don't think it's related to your problem.

OK, how can I change the FS w/o destroying the data?

You can't.

are you sure? i think that would be kind of stupid of the developers of those filesystems..

davidguyc: it's worth a try, to either use grub and see if the problem persists or mail the lilo guy (with the information he requests on his homepage, of course)

Well, LILO crashed again, and I can't get it up and running again. Where can I go to create a new Live CD? The one I have, it's kernel is too old, and I would like to possibly put my current kernel on a cd, as well as ntfs-3g.

I never had a problem with lilo crashing... with exception of that one time when I wiped my linux partition.... it still booted lilo and gave all the options for about a month after that. Then one day it finally realized that its config file was missing.... Also, with my slack 11 install I do notice that once in a while when I boot it just sits there, before it shows lilo, with that stupid little cursor on the top left. Then I shut it off, boot it up again, and its fine. Just something to kinda laugh at I guess?

Later,
DragonM15

Get the diagnostic utility for your hard drive. UBCD is great it has
most of them on it. All your files live on the hard drive so check its integrity first.

Yes, I'm sure. It works pretty well with ext2/ext3 which is probably what everybody was using when LILO was first written. On those filesystems, the kernel doesn't seem to move around very much. I've had one problem with LILO in about six months using ext2/3. It's annoying but easy enough to fix.

It's really an advantage to LILO when you think about it. GRUB and other file-system-aware bootloaders have to have coded-in support for every filesystem they will allow you to boot from because they run standalone at boot-time (before Linux is running). LILO ("LInux LOader") uses the file system support built into Linux- it gets set up while Linux is running so it can just do normal file IO from a c language program without having to care about what kind of filesystem you're using. As soon as Linux supports a new filesystem (XFS, JFS, whatever) LILO instantly works, while GRUB has to have code specifically to read the filesystem without Linux running. Like most things in the programming world, it's a tradeoff.

Use the Slackware installer disk 1 to boot into your system, chroot, then run LILO.

P.S. And see the following post which shows another advantage of LILO's design- you can toast a config file or delete the whole OS and filesystem you ran LILO from and it will still work

How to change your filesystem: you have to have some extra space on your drive. Create a partition, format it as ext2 (or ext3) then copy from old to new. Once you're sure everything on the new system is valid, delete the old system, make a new ext2/3 filesystem there, and copy everything back.

Because LILO does all his setup when you run LILO from the command line, he doesn't read configs when booting. He creates a file and saves the disk address of it and that's all he needs. That's why you can delete a config (or even the whole OS and filesystem that you used LILO from) and as long as nothing else changes, you can still boot all your other systems.

Hi,

I would make sure that the hardware is not the problem. Get the diagnostics for your drive. Run them!

As stated the 'UBCD' is another source for diagnosing this type of problem. It looks like the 'IPL' is your problem, you could use 'ranish' to make sure that the 'MBR' is set to 'standard IPL'.

It really looks like a hardware problem!

Well, if the hardware is the problem (God forbid), I guess it doesn't matter, I am getting the last bit of parts of my new computer in the mail tomorrow. Where can I go exactly to find out how to do hardware diagnostics. I plan on using one of my old HDD's as a backup drive, and I don't want to have a backup drive that's about to fail.