Problem Booting (LILO problem)
 

I just installed slackware but I can't boot without a bootdisk because LILO stops at 'L'. I have my /boot partition as active and I installed LILO in my mbr. Here is what I have done so far:

1. Used a windows bootdisk to do fdisk /mbr then reinstalled LILO with the "LILO -V" command. Didn't work.

2. Uninstalled LILO with the LILO -U command then reinstalled lILO with the "LILO -v" command. Didn't work.

3. Tried to install the mbr with lilo -M /dev/hda mbr command. Didn't work either.

I'm stuck!!!

UGH. This makes no sense. I want a working slack system before the night is out so I think I will just reinstall and see if it works then. I am thinking maybe when I installed slackware my mbr wasn't erased and it conflicted with LILO in some way. Before this I had FreeBSD installed. But then why didn't it boot when I fdisk /mbr then reinstalled LILO? :confused: Odd...

Generally all you need to do to restore lilo is run (as root) /sbin/lilo ,then you should see some feed back like added xxx added yyy and such. My example
assumes that lilo resides in /sbin, doing a whereis lilo will tell you where look , but most all distributions put the executiable for lilo in /sbin.

I did that a bunch of times, none of them working. Each time the boot would stop at 'L'. I guess I should have really looked at the verbose output. Oh well. I'm reinstalling.

" Oh well. I'm reinstalling."


Before you do that check your /etc/ lilo.conf file.

From the lilo.conf man page:

boot=boot-device
Sets the name of the device (e.g. a hard disk par-
tition) that contains the boot sector. If this key-
word is omitted, the boot sector is read from (and
possibly written to) the device that is currently
mounted as root.

It could be possible that your putting lilo somewhere other than the MBR.

I had that. And I'm sure it installed LILO on the MBR because I picked to install it on the mbr during the slackware install.

I had boot = /dev/hda1 in lilo.conf. That is my /boot partition. And it's set as active.

This information is from the book SUSE Linux Installation and Configuration

L - LILO is installed, but it cannot continue functioning, probalyl a media failure or incurrect geometry specified in the configuration file.

LI appears - Either the same as above, or the file /boot/boot.b does not exist. Or if you have an old BIOS in which the boot directory exceeds the 1024-cylinder boundary.

Well I don't have a boot.b file. I remember last time I had slack I didnt have a boot.b file either. :confused:

"Well I don't have a boot.b file. I remember last time I had slack I didnt have a boot.b file either"

Ok, now ya' got me stumped. I'll have to defere to someone with more expertise.

Yah I looked in /boot and also did a find and there is no boot.b file. The lilo.conf file generated by slack doesn't contain a install = /boot/boot.b that I have seen with other distros.

I reinstalled slack and had LILO placed on the root drive. And guess what? I get "L 99 99 99 99 99 99 ..." a whole bunch of 99's when I try to boot. GRRRRRRRRRR! I made the root directory my active drive too. I'm baffled.

This is interesting... As I posted above I installed LILO on the root drive and got that error. Well I did another fdisk /mbr (and then the /sbin/lilo -v command) and now when it boots I get a "missing operating system" message. If any expert on this subject can chime in, it will be much appreciated.

"I reinstalled slack and had LILO placed on the root drive."

During the install when you get to the part where the installer asks you where you want to install lilo it should give you the option of installing lilo to the MBR.
Generally there's a caution about it possibably being unsafe to do so, but lilo
needs to be installed to the MBR ( hda as opposed to hda1)

Well yeah. I installed lilo to the mbr the first time and I got the 'L' bootup error.

Ok, head scratchin' time. Tell me a bit about your specs.Are you dual booting
with windows on a large HD?The kernel lives in the first 1024 cylinders, so this might create some problems with windows being in a big partition, and linux being "tail end charlie"

Nope. Only OS is Slackware. I made /boot the first partition - so it is within the cylinder limit.

"Nope. Only OS is Slackware. I made /boot the first partition - so it is within the cylinder limit."

Ok. let me ingest a pot of coffee, and do a bit of googling

I can't give a complete answer, since I don't fully understand the interaction between LILO and the BIOS. However, I had a problem similar to this and solved it by setting the HD to LBA mode in BIOS. The BIOS of that (pretty old) machine has four different HD modes, NORMAL, LBA, LARGE and AUTO. I don't know anything about them actually, but when I changed BIOS settings from NORMAL to LBA it suddenly worked.

It's frustrating to solve the problems without knowing what I've done. So if anyone could give some info about the BIOS HD modes, I'd be happy as a clown.

Regards
Martin

Ok, as I understand it when lilo loads it displays the word lilo, when bad things happen the leters that are printed can be used to identify the problem:

LI can mean a geometery mismatch
LIL can mean a media failure, or geometry mismatch

You can try playing with the modes in BIOS . If you have the option of toggling LBA on/off, try off, if the options are NORMAL,LBA,LARGE, or AUTO,
try NORMAL

Most install disc's will allow you the option of using it as a rescue disc. Try booting to single user mode (rescue) with the install disc. open /ect/lilo.conf with VI ,or another text editor and try either the options linear ,or
lba32 at the top of your lilo.conf file, exit the editor and run /sbin/lilo

From the lilo.conf man page:

linear- Generate linear sector addresses instead of sec-
tor/head/cylinder addresses. Linear addresses are
translated at run time and do not depend on disk
geometry. Note that boot disks may not be portable
if `linear' is used, because the BIOS service to
determine the disk geometry does not work reliably
for floppy disks. When using `linear' with large
disks, /sbin/lilo may generate references to inac-
cessible disk areas, because 3D sector addresses
are not known before boot time.


lba32- Generate 32-bit Logical Block Addresses instead of
sector/head/cylinder addresses. If the BIOS sup-
ports packet addressing, then packet calls will be
used to access the disk. This allows booting from
any partition on disks greater than 8.4Gb, the
translated geometry limit for C:H:S addressing. If
the BIOS does not support packet addressing, then
'lba32' addresses are translated to C:H:S, just as
for 'linear'. Using 'lba32', all floppy disk refer-
ences are retained in C:H:S form.

Good luck, personally I hate using text editors from the cli, but this is an example of why its a handy thing to learn.

Tried all that; didn't work. I even replaced the hard-drive and reinstalled Slackware. Guess what? I STILL GOT THE 'L' LILO boot problem. What the hell is going on!!!! I am about to reinstall yet again and just put LILO on a floppy and always boot from it. Jeez this is so frustrating.

The one thing common to both hard-drives is I had FreeBSD on it before installing slackware. But I did delete the BSD partitions. Do you think this has anything to do with it??

1. Check you don't have some strange anti-virus feature enabled in your bios
2. so running "lilo -b /dev/hda" gives no error, but doesn't boot, right?
3. can we have some info on your hd model/size and bios date? Some old bioses simply won't access any disk larger than 32GB
4. you can give grub a try ;)

I got it working!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! All I needed was to add the word "linear" to lilo.conf. Jeez, all that work for one little word I needed. :) Thanks to all who offered suggestions!