Can't install lilo after reinstalling windows
 

hi everyone,

the deal is that I had both SLACK and winxp on my pc, but I needed to reinstall win (keeping my SLACK) hoping to renstall lilo after win writes the new MBR... So I did it...

what happens is that i try to install lilo (by inserting the 1º slack cd mounting my root partition an running pkgtool) I get a lilo error #127.

My partition table is now the following:

NAME...............FLAGS............PART TYPE.....FS TYPE................. LABEL.........

hda5.....................................logical............NTFS..................... [^A]
hda2................boot..............primary.........W95 FAT32 (LDA)
hda3.....................................primary.........LINUX SWAP
hda4.....................................primary.........LINUX EXT2

HDA5 FOR WIN
HDA2 FOR DATA

furthermore i can't run command lilo (won't recognize)

I'm makng a project and I urgently need linux.

Thanks

I'm not sure what you mean by '(won't recognize)', but maybe you should try using Tom's root/boot. It's the best rescue disk I've used. After you boot from Tom's, run 'man lilo' and 'man chroot'. One of them gives an excellent explanation of the procedure for reinstalling Lilo. It's always worked for me.

Enjoy!
--- Cerbere

You dont actually have to reinstall lilo, if you use your slack cd 1 then mount your linux install
then chroot to that directory
e.g. chroot /mnt/linuxinstall
then just run lilo it should rewrite what everything to the MBR.

dopefish, what you are describing IS the process of (re)installing Lilo. In this context, this means installing the boot loader. I don't think dllmetal was referring to re-installing the Lilo package. I know that I certainly didn't.

From the Lilo man page:Enjoy!
--- Cerbere

Don't know what the error 127 means, but anyway... you don't need to reinstall the lilo tgz package ( you mentioned using pkgtool ) That is... if you didn't remove the lilo package... otherwise you DO need to re-install it :-)

You do however need to issue the lilo command.
If you can't directly access it... go to the /sbin directory and type ./lilo

Hope that helps.

well I think that you didn't understand me... I want to modify my lilo.conf so I've tried to edited manually and then run lilo... but the result was a fatal error when it was adding windows, so as that didn't result I tried to overwrite lilo with pkgtool but no result (at the end of the configuration it says: it wasn't possible to write lilo - that's one of the mosdt explicit error messages I've ever seen :) ) does anyone knows what can I do? or at least what is the problem??

Is my partition table correct??

Cerbere I can access that my slack cd and live cds but the problem is that it just not installs and I don't have an idea why...

What did you change in your lilo.conf? can you post your lilo.conf

Since you seem to be kind of new at this. If you can boot into your Slack install, just try using liloconfig to reset lilo, installing it to the mbr. If your conf file points to root then rerunning lilo won't likely help.

i got something related question to this one :)
i have win, slackware installed (bootloader is lilo)
now im gona to install Fedora on teh same box, as you ppl know fc will install grub.
just wana confirm if i choose to install grub, would it give me menu and Slackware in this menu?
what will be the best choice when chooseing b/w lilo and grub?
thanks in advance :)

ringwraith, it's not that, 've done this many times but and installed it always at mbr.... but I just don't know what is happening! well anyways I will post my lilo.conf it a few minutes

@mardanian
 

No GRUB from Fedora Core won't load Slackware by default but it's easy to set it up to load Slack as long as you know the right partition that Slack is installed and the kernel you want to use. I usually make a symlink to the kernel so that it is /boot/vmlinuz instead of vmlinuz-xxxx so that if I change it I don't have to reconfigure grub. Here is a copy of my /boot/grub/menu.1st from Slack .

default=0
timeout=10
lba32
color red/black green/blue
title Slackware
kernel (hd1,0)/boot/vmlinuz ro root=/dev/hdb1 vga=788
title FedoraCore
kernel (hd1,2)/boot/vmlinuz ro root=/dev/hdb3 rhgb
/boot/initrd.img
title WindowsXP
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive

Note that my Fedora Core partition is on /dev/hdb3 which is hd1,2 to grub.

Okay, first things first:

Fedora will give you the option to not install a bootloader, I recommend this option. Here's my reasoning:

It's much easier to set up LILO, in my opinion. Sure, on-the-fly boot commands can be nice, but I find it unnecessary if you're prepared like me and know how to boot off of a boot disk. Second: I cannot boot to XP with GRUB. I've tried for hours trying to figure out how to get it to work, but because of my config, I just can't get it to work. LILO, however, works well. All I suggest is to never use LILO's automated install setup. For me, it's been nothing but trouble, but maybe that's because I install my bootloaders on HDE, and I leave HDA alone as a backup in case I need to boot into XP and something bad happened with whichever bootloader was previously using (Such as bad hard drive, etc, all I have to do is switch my hard drive booter through my BIOS.)

Hi reddazz,
Hope that you still monitor this thread :)
Pardon me if this question is a silly one, but if I have to make a symlink to the kernel like your advice so that it is /boot/vmlinuz instead of vmlinuz-xxxx in lilo.conf, where do I put that command. Do I have to issue the command in a terminal console ?
Thanks in advance.

You can make a symbolink link by using: ln -s /boot/vmlinuz-xxxx /boot/vmlinuz of course in a terminal as root.

EDIT: Forgot to say that slackware by default comes with this symlink :)

Thanks gbonvehi,
I presumed that once I issued, as root, this command in terminal : ln -s /boot/vmlinuz-xxxx /boot/vmlinuz, it will stay recognized every time I login to my box. won't it.