Can someone please explain the rescue disk concept.

I have installed mandrake 10 and get a Lilo error L01 01 01 01 at startup.
I can boot from the CD and eter rescue mode console. The root doesnt seem to be the root of my hd though. If i look for lilo or ld.so.conf in the usual places they do not exist. If i then mount my mandrake drive and look inside that then all the files are there.

Is the rescue console a virtual drive for rescue purposes? If i try to edit ld.so.conf after mounting i get access denied.

Also can i boot mandrake from this rescue disk. Like mount the hd and go in and execute a file that start KDE or GNOME or something?

"I can boot from the CD and eter rescue mode console. The root doesnt seem to be the root of my hd though. If i look for lilo or ld.so.conf in the usual places they do not exist. If i then mount my mandrake drive and look inside that then all the files are there."

You can use the chroot command to switch to your Mandrake / partition. For example, if your / partition is /dev/hdb1 then issue:

mkdir /horse
mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb1 /horse
chroot /horse

see man chroot

"Is the rescue console a virtual drive for rescue purposes? If i try to edit ld.so.conf after mounting i get access denied."

You cannot edit anything on the CD-ROM as it is a read only device. Mount your Mandrake / partition on a directory, for example /horse, and then edit the ld.so.conf on your Mandrake / partition.

mkdir /horse
mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb1 /horse
vi /horse/etc/ld.so.conf

"Also can i boot mandrake from this rescue disk. Like mount the hd and go in and execute a file that start KDE or GNOME or something?"

Maybe. The boot scripts for the rescue CD are not the same as the boot scripts on your Mandrake system. So you can chroot to your Mandrake / partition and try to start KDE or Gnome. It may or may not work. The thing to do is chroot to your Mandrake / partition and fix Mandrake so it will boot. Then reboot.



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Steve Stites

Thanks you've been very helpful.

I have had lots of advice on fixing lilo but none had told me to chroot to the mandrake drive. I had been mounting it and cd to /mnt. This may make the diff. Thanks again

ok so i was able to chroot ok and re-install lilo but still when i boot i get the lilo error L 01 01 01 01 01 01

lilo.conf looks good. The file ld.so.conf looks a little bare though.
(i am running mandrake 10)

Can someone post what is in their ls.do.conf file or advise me as to what should be in it. I am thinking that ALL the paths to libraries should be in here?

"ok so i was able to chroot ok and re-install lilo but still when i boot i get the lilo error L 01 01 01 01 01 01"

The lilo boatloader on the Master Boot Record has an absolute disk address pointer to the location of a file in /boot. The 01 error means that your BIOS loaded the MBR and then the small LILO program on the MBR was unable to read its data file from the absolute disk address. I can think of three possible causes for a 01 message.

You may not have run the lilo command. Whenever you make changes to /etc/lilo.conf you have to run the lilo command to set up the /boot data and the MBR again.

Your hard drive may be larger than your BIOS can address. If you have an older BIOS and a new hard drive the BIOS may not be able to address the entire hard drive. If your /boot sits beyond the BIOS addressing limit then the BIOS cannot handle the lilo request to read the data file in /boot. If this is your problem then the solution is to create a small partition at /dev/hda1 and place /boot there.

Occasionally a bad drive/BIOS combination will be subject to flakey hardware problems that the simple lilo program on the MBR cannot handle. If that is the case then switch to grub which works better with flakey hardware.

"The file ld.so.conf looks a little bare though."

ld.so.conf is irrelevent to your lilo problem.

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Steve Stites

Thanks very much jailbait.



If i was to choose to make a partition on hda how would i go about it? How big? Mount point? filesystem?

Will this upset windowz at all which is on this drive?

If i choose to install grub do i need to uninstall lilo?
When i try to install grub by 'grub-install /dev/hda' i get the error:
/dev/ram3 does not have any corresponding BIOS drive.