Hi guy's
I'm in chapter 9 of the lfs book. I was able to boot my system , beit no tas I should of have. Here is the deal.
After finishing lfs on a debian knoppix I ran from cd, I wanted to put lilo on a floppy. (on a floppy fist because I wanted to see if all was as it is supposed to be). So I ran "/sbin/lilo -v -b /dev/fd0" . But lilo complaind that some file system was read only and it could there for not execute the command. After much tring and thinking, I did "/sbin/lilo -b /dev/fd0 -r $LFS -v". That worked and I was able to boot from the floppy thus created.
Once in my new lfs system, I did "/sbin/lilo -v" to write lilo to the mbr. But now it complaind that : "/dev/hda4: no such device". What the f**** ? So I did "/sbin/lilo -b /dev/fd0 -v". Again, "/dev/fd0: no such device" And the most wierd part is, I can mound both /dev/hdax and /dev/fd0 fine. I can do any thing I want, (echo "bala" > /dev/fd0 worked fine). But I can't put lilo on either the mbr or a floppy. Any thoughts any one?

Send us your lilo.conf file please.

secondly, trying using 'strace' (like strace lilo blah) and look at its output. It'll give you more clues which files it tries to open, in what mode and what went wrong there. Could just be a simple permission problem.

strace, btw, can be found at freshmeat.net

Thanks for your replie lfslinux. I solved the problem my self.
What I did was rebuild lilo on my booted lfs system. After reinstalling lilo, the problem went away.
But I have a question. Do you know what that boot.b file is that resides in the /boot dirctory? I ask this because the first time I wanted to install lilo, it complained about boot.b not being there. I didn't know what to do so I did "touch /boot/boot.b" and hoped for the best. Maby that was the problem all along?

the *.b files in /boot is the boot loader program itself.

Normally you'll see different .b files there such as boot-menu.b boot-text.b chain.b mbr.b os2_d.b and sometimes boot-bmp.b

boot.b is often a symlink to either boot-menu.b (default) or boot-text.b

boot-menu.b gives you that menu driven LILO boot loader menu. boot-text.b gives you a text based interface only without a menu where you can use the arrow keys to select between kernel images. os2_d.b is used to bootstrap IBM's OS/2 (unless I'm mistaken) chain.b is the chain bootloader, typically used to bootstrap Microsoft DOS/Windows. mbr.b - no idea really.