The problem I'm having is twofold. I don't think they're related, but solving one would help the other.

I thought that I was cool when I manged to get Win98 and RH7.0 to both boot from my 20G HD. I had partitioned it out so that Windows could be as egocentric as it liked in the 1st partition, but with RH in a Linux native in the second (both beneath the 1024th cylinder) made a 256M swap and used the rest as shared FAT32 space. LILO booted both fine and all was well. Then RH refused to run X (it wouldn't recognise my Nvidia Geforce 2 Ultra) despite my acquiring the supposed fix from Nvidia. Seeing that RH 7.2's kernel seemed to resolve this issue (and may or may not get along with my Athlon...) I DLed and installed (not upgraded) that.

The installation went fine and I chose LILO as it worked for me before. On my first boot, I got to 'LI' and the system stopped. Crtl-Alt-Del didn't work so I killed it and I booted up from the floppy I'd made with the install, made it into GNOME and from there went about looking around for solutions online. This was going well until I realized that I couldn't log in as root. Thinking that I misstyped something, I reinstalled and carefully typed in the root password. I also switched to GRUB, thinking that perhaps it would handle the boot better. This time instead of a 'LI' I got a freeze at 'GRUB loading stage 2' Again Crtl-Alt-Del didn't work so I cut the power and booted with the same floppy. Once in Linux I tried to take a look at my grub.conf only to discover that again, I couldn't log in as root. Using to floppy again I went into single user mode and changed to root passwork. i rebooted and it *still* didn't let me in. Again I init 6'ed the @#$% thing and this time changed the password of the root and one of the users I'd set up. The changed user password worked fine. The root did not. At this point I went into single user mode again and edited my passwd file so that I have root acess so that I could at least look at the @#$% grub.conf file.

default=0
timeout=20
splashimage=(hd0,1)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
password --md5 $1$3ZHä5Jõl$XUaSnhls.jrJKmoWfmYUS.
title Red Hat Linux (2.4.7-10)
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.7-10 ro root=/dev/hda2

#There was 'hdc=ide-scsi at the end of the previous line that the RH installer put in. I tried booting with and #without it....nothing different.

title Windows 98
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1s

So...

1) What's up with the dual boot?
2) Why doesn't the root password change?3) Why does God hate me?

Help?

My advice would be to download the latest version of lilo, install it to your mbr, edit your lilo.conf to boot both os's (don't forget to run lilo after editing lilo.conf) and see if that fixes the boot problems, also the newer versions of lilo don't suffer from the 1024 issue.

I just got the newest version of LILO (22.2) so I'll give it a shot when I get back home. Any idea on what's going on with the root password?

sory.. i'm confused... how could this be a repost if you've only made two posts, both to this one thread....

If you poke around for the LILO codes, how far lilo gets in printing the word LILO is an indicator to what's wrong. Offhand I think I remember that LI means it can't find the kernel in the conf file, but its been a while.

Also, the 1024 limit was cracked after lilo 21.4, a long while before the lilo that shipped with RH 7.2, but upgrading Lilos couldn't hurt.

Cheers,

Finegan

Hmm....I don't have a boot partition, so I'll make sure that LILO knows where it has to go to find the kernel.

acid_kewpie: I was referring to the posts by other users having problems similar to mine (dual boot, LILO, GRUB, etc) to state that I had read them and hadn't found anything of use in addressing my problem.

LI means usually that LILO is broken... So maybe try to deinstall it: lilo -u and then install again: lilo.