Hi to all,

I'm hoping that someone here can help me recover my trashed Slackware 9 install. Basically, I downloaded swaret (a very impressive tool) and ran an 'upgrade all', which all seemed to run according to plan. I then ran LILO afterwards to make sure that no errors were thrown up, and that it all seemed to work ok, which it did. I rebooted, and everything came up as normal.

'Great!', I thought, 'who says linux is tricky?'

However, the next time I rebooted (having not changed anything at all except getting ALSA going on my machine) the screen filled up with '07 07 07' repeatedly for half a screen. Nothing else happened. By booting from my Slackware CD, I've used cfdisk to switch the bootable drive from /dev/hda2 to /dev/hda1 (where my Windows partition is) I've managed to get into Windows, and it's from there that I'm writing this.

I've tried reinstalling/reconfiguring LILO from the Slackware CD I originally installed from, but this hasn't changed the situation, and I REALLY don't want to start from scratch again unless I have to.

Any help would be gratefully appreciated! And yes, I am a newbie, so please be gentle with me...

When you boot to the CD.
It will ask you something at the "boot:" Pass the parameters for the bare.i kernel to the "boot:" and see if it will load.

Hi labr@,

OK, I've done that following the on-screen instructions to point the kernel to my own root partition, so the boot parameter that I used was actually along the lines of 'bare.i=dev/hda2'

hda2 being where my Slackware 9 installation resides. This has allowed me to boot into Linux from the cd, and log in as root without needing a password. This is how I got into Linux last time and tried (without success) to reinstall/reconfigure LILO. Any further help much appreciated, thanks...

Try to clean MBR and reinstall LILO or Wrilte lilo into floppy (just try it )
hope this helps.

If you got in without a password, I don't think you actually booted "Your" system...you should still need to login using a valid username and password.

If this is exactly what you entered, you did not boot your system, which is why you had no luck with repairing Lilo. Instead, do...

bare.i root=/dev/hda2 noinitrd ro

This will boot your system using the bare.i kernel from the cd. You can then log in and reconfigure Lilo. I think you can reinstall Lilo to the mbr using lilo /M /dev/hda...check the man pages and see what switch installs Lilo to the mbr.

If you don't want to install Lilo to the MBR, you can just install it to / (root) and use the Windows boot loader. To do this...

Boot the Linux system (using the steps described in previous post), install Lilo to /, configure and run lilo...then do...

dd if=/dev/hda2 of=/bootsect.lnx bs=512 count=1

Then format a floppy disk...
mkfs -t msdos /dev/fd0

Then copy bootsect.lnx to the floppy...
mcopy /bootsect.lnx a:

Boot into Windows, and add this to boot.ini...
C:\BOOTSECT.LNX="Linux"

Copy bootsect.lnx from floppy to Windows C: drive...

When you reboot, you can choose linux which will run Lilo, and you can choose which kernel you want to boot.

Just another thought

Thanx DaOne,

I'm pleased to report problem solved. It seems that somehow despite the fact that I was installing LILO to /dev/hda2 and not the MBR LILO was still looking on the MBR.

As you said above, I wasn't booting into my system initially, just the standard Slackware shell for setting up Slackware. Once I'd got past that (thanks again) an uninstall and reinstall of LILO (plus a boot into Windows Recovery Console to write a new MBR to the beginning of the disc) was all it took to get up and running again.

My apologies for being so dozy, and thanks again to all who've helped.

Mark

hehehe
linux isn't tricky

Lilo is.