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Having just spent over 3 hour's trying to install gentoo onto a spare partition (and failing dismally), I now find that my boot loader is hosed and I can't boot back into my mandrake 9.1 install.
I've tried booting with my install dvd, and using the rescue facility to re-install the bootloader, but to no avail.
I'm just getting a failure notice from the dialogue and when I try a reboot, I just get the old L99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 routine.
I have been able to restore the windows boot loader and I also had the presence of mind to make a boot floppy, so I can get into my mandrake install.
You could try installing lilo again but I think it just uses a lilo config file in the root partition to backup from when you do that and if the partition table have changed then it might not work.
Try removing the gento partitions if all else fails.
Reading boot sector from /dev/hda
Using MENU secondary loader
Calling map_insert_data
Mapping message file /boot/message
Fatal: open /boot/message: No such file or directory
Post your lilo.conf file. As the error message indicates, /boot/message is a configuration file in your /boot directory. Actually it's a link to /boot/message-graphic, i.e. it problably controls the graphic backsplash for lilo. Anyway, it appears that the gentoo install trashed it somehow. The good news is I don't think you need it to boot; you just won't have a nice graphic for lilo. In your lilo.conf, try commenting out this line at the begginning by placing a "#" sign in front of :
message=/boot/message
Then try the lilo -v thing again and see if lilo will write to the mbr.
Last edited by kilgoretrout; 03-11-2004 at 12:01 PM.
[root@johnsPC john]# vi /etc/lilo.conf
[root@johnsPC john]# /sbin/lilo -v
LILO version 22.4.1, Copyright (C) 1992-1998 Werner Almesberger
Development beyond version 21 Copyright (C) 1999-2002 John Coffman
Released 27-Jan-2003 and compiled at 11:11:26 on Feb 5 2003.
Reading boot sector from /dev/hda
Using MENU secondary loader
Calling map_insert_data
Fatal: open /boot/uk.klt: No such file or directory
Is what I get with the /boot/message commented out. I'm presuming that that's saying that it can't see my keyboard file ? I think.
So on removing the comment, it reverts to this
Quote:
[root@johnsPC john]# vi /etc/lilo.conf
[root@johnsPC john]# /sbin/lilo -v
LILO version 22.4.1, Copyright (C) 1992-1998 Werner Almesberger
Development beyond version 21 Copyright (C) 1999-2002 John Coffman
Released 27-Jan-2003 and compiled at 11:11:26 on Feb 5 2003.
Reading boot sector from /dev/hda
Using MENU secondary loader
Calling map_insert_data
Mapping message file /boot/message
Fatal: open /boot/message: No such file or directory
Where it just can't see the "/boot/message" and this is what's confusing me. I'm sorry if this sounds like a very stupid question, but for the life of me, I can't think of what else I need to check.
Open up /boot and see what's there. It sounds like the /boot directory was pretty screwed up during the gentoo install. I know gentoo will make a separate boot partition by default. You can post the output of:
$ ls /boot
and I will check it against mine.
Another thing you can try is to unistall lilo in mcc>Software and then reinstall it. It might restore your /boot directory to the proper state. Another thing you can try is doing an"Upgrade" reinstall, i.e. boot off of CD-1, select the "Upgrade" option, don't select any packages and hope that it restroes your /boot directory.
I'm just gonna have a go at doing the uninstall/re-install thing - but I won't be able to check it yet, I'm in the middle of downloading mandrake 10 community (disc 3).
What the hell. I'll leave it until the download has finished.
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