Mandrake, no-hlt instruction and editing menu.lst
 

Hi folks,

I'm having problems with my old computer and Mandrake 10.1. When starting the installation the system hung on the "Checking no-hlt instruction". OK, so I browse the web and realize I have to start the installation with 'no-hlt' appended to the startup command.

Everything goes smoothly, the system installs but of course, when I boot it up again it still hangs at the same point. So, I browse the web some more, read some stuff about LILO which is interesting, but in the long run rather useless since I realize I have GRUB on my system. OK, more browsing, I learn vi and now know how to open the menu.lst to fiddle around with the boot settings.

I presume the 'no-hlt' option should be added to the line that begins with kernel (correct me if I'm wrong here). I take backup copies of the original and the new, modified menu.lst (put them in /tmp). I boot up the system again...and it hangs again, at the very same point. And when I go back to the rescue area I notice that *all* my changes to menu.lst have disappeared and my backup copies are gone with the wind.

So, now I'm tired, slightly hungover (it's New Year's Day, after all) and I'm tired of browsing the web. Please, what am I doing wrong, what should I do - how can I pass the 'no-hlt' parameter to the kernel on bootup?

Any help is much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Zup

I assume that you used a rescue disk to gain access to your Mandrake system?

If thats so then possibly you modified the rescue systems grub file rather than your real one.

When you boot a rescue disk your real linux hard disk is mounted as /mnt/hd<something>, the something depends on whether or not you have a seperate /boot partition.

Happy New Year - I usually do some of my more interesting coding after a bottle of red :)

Just leave your backups in /boot/grub till you've got it sorted.

Previous advise is on the money, check your editing on the correct partition.

You should be able to insert that line in the grub command line at boot. Grub is a very powerful bootloader and is capable of many things.

http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/grub-faq.html#TOCq11

Hi folks,

Yep, thx for your replies - I obviously was editing a grub-file sitting on some RAM-disk. Hence the disappearance of all my changes... I mounted my harddisk, did the changes, and everything runs just fine now (and my headache is gone!). Thx for the help, much obliged.

Happy new year, sez

Zup

Yeah, been there done that. Its nice when your problem turns out to be that easy.