I have both Windows XP and Debian testing on my laptop, with lilo as boot loader. I was playing with making a new 2.6.5 kernel and made a stupid mistake - compiled ext3 into the kernel instead of as a module, so that when I booted up the new kernel it fixed the filesystem so as to cause my old 2.4 kernel to panic. Unfortunately the new kernel booted up nicely but absolutely would not give me a shell, so it's unusable.

So I booted off a Knoppix CD with the intention of recompiling my 2.4 kernel with ext3 built in. All went fine, up to installing the new kernel package, until I tried to run lilo. This is what happened:

chroot /mnt/hda7
dpkg -i kernel-image-2.4.22-rc2-ac1_123.Custom_i386.deb
<messages indicating that all was well>
lilo
Fatal: open /dev/hda: Permission denied

I'd had no problems running lilo after prior kernel builds.

I can't think why this is happening or how to get around it - does anybody have any ideas?? In case it has something to do with the mount options, here is the Knoppix fstab:

# Added by KNOPPIX
/dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1 ntfs noauto,users,exec,ro,umask=000,uid=knoppix,gid=knoppix 0 0
# Added by KNOPPIX
/dev/hda5 /mnt/hda5 vfat noauto,users,exec,umask=000,uid=knoppix,gid=knoppix 0 0
# Added by KNOPPIX
/dev/hda6 none swap defaults 0 0
# Added by KNOPPIX
/dev/hda7 /mnt/hda7 ext3 noauto,users,exec 0 0

Thanks!!

You might try running "lilo -C <path to the lilo.conf file you want> -b /dev/hd<c,d,a, whatever>". Run this without chrooting to the hard drive, and it should install the configuration from that file to the hard drive listed after -b. I tried the same thing a while ago, but I messed it up by using -M instead of -b. I could never get lilo to work from a chrooted environment... I think because the Knoppix kernel isn't using the /dev directory from the hard drive. Anyway, hope that helps.

Thanks for the suggestion...I'd tried that, and I got the following error message:

Fatal: creat boot.map: read-only file system

I tried the option to specifiy the map file but that didn't help either...

Is /dev/hda mounted (rw) when you do this? Even if you're not chrooting (which I don't know why you wouldn't), it still has to be mounted, doesn't it?

I don't think you can mount a hard drive like that...all the partitions are mounted rw except for the ntfs system containing windows xp...

I just realized why the /dev/hda error message comes up...the device directory under /mnt/hda7 doesn't apply when I'm running from the Knoppix CD! So, it makes no sense to run lilo under chroot. I think it will work if I can figure out how to tell lilo the location of the boot directory, but I can't find an option for that. Anybody know?

What exactly are you chrooting then? Is there some reason that you can't chroot /mnt/hda7 (which I assume is your Debian install with the bad LiLO)?

That is, after all, the whole purpose of chroot.

Or am I missing something?

Solved the problem - the root device has to mounted from an su shell in Knoppix. Then lilo worked perfectly. Phew!