I recently installed Solaris on my computer, which already had Windoze Xp and Slackware Linux on it. Solaris overwrote the mbr, and it didn't detect and put linux on the menu. Solaris ended up reacting oddly to my video card, and I want to get my old lilo back. I booted from knoppix and attempted to run /mnt/hdb6/sbin/lilo but it complained about /etc/lilo.conf. I remembered it would look for the lilo.conf relative to / not ./ so I chrooted with chroot /mnt/hdb6/. Now when I run lilo it says
"Fatal: open /dev/hda: Permission denied"
I'm not sure how to go on fromm here. Any help?

are you running as root and/or did you mount the partition where the kernel is (? /boot maybe)

"Fatal: open /dev/hda: Permission denied"

knoppix mounts every partition that it finds as read only. You might try umounting /dev/hda before you chroot. Perhaps before you umount you could list the mounted file systems with the mount command to see what you might have to umount before you chroot.

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Steve Stites

The partition with the lilo binary/conf is hdb6 and is mounted at /mnt/hdb6 read/write.

hda isn't mounted anywhere, I have 6 partitions on it. hda1 is mounted read/write, but I did try umounting it though. I just got the same error.

After breezing over the man page for lilo, I found out how to specify a lilo.conf. I tried lilo -C /mnt/hdb6/etc/lilo.conf but I got the following:

/dev/mapper/control: open failed: No such device
Is device-mapper driver missing from kernel?
/dev/mapper/control: open failed: No such device
Is device-mapper driver missing from kernel?
Incompatible libdevmapper 1.00.19-ioctl (2004-07-03)(compat) and kernel driver
Fatal: creat /boot/map~: Read-only file system


Is it safe to assume this is because it is looking for everything relevant to /?

After doing a little more digging, I found out that sometimes lilo won't overwrite the mbr if it found another lilo there. I don't have lilo installed, but this could be a similar problem. The solution I read was to clean the mbr. So my question is how do I do that without losing data like solutions such as "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda" lol. So that means no lost partition tables and such. Would "lilo -M" do the trick?