After updating my Slackware-current installation yesterday I encountered a strange problem. Since the kernel was updated too, I proceeded to rerun the lilo command, but it stalled with no output to the terminal. I waited for about half an hour and tried to kill it, but it wouldn't die after a Ctrl+C, I had to close the terminal. Next time I ran strace lilo to see where it gets stuck. Turns out, it tries, for some unknown reason, to open /dev/hda, which is a CD-ROM drive in my Dell Inspiron 5100. The hard drive is /dev/hdc, and everything seems to be right in the /etc/lilo.conf file.

After trying some tricks, unsuccessfully, like manually giving different options to lilo in the command line, I finally sort of solved the issue by renaming /dev/hda into /dev/hdaOLD, running lilo (which now worked as usual) and renaming it back again.

There's no CD in the drive. lilo worked perfectly fine before, and it's the same version 22.8. I'm quite confused about what happened. Could anyone provide some ideas?

`lilo -b /dev/hdc` should probably have done the trick, but I'm not sure. Also, the 'boot' parameter in lilo.conf should point to /dev/hdc.

Hi, thanks for answering.

That was the first thing I tried. Still, lilo hangs, although saying that it would skip the "boot" section in the config file.
It does. Actually, I haven't changed the config file for a long time, it always worked nicely.

Strange. The only thing I could suggest is to pass the -v option (or -v 5 for complete verbosity) to lilo to see what's going on. All of my LILO installs have been successful, so I'm not the best for LILO troubleshooting (but my system is very simple with only one SATA hard drive and one IDE DVD drive, with no dual-boot setup). Some others with more experience may be able to help you further. It does seem like a strange problem.

Are you positive that your hard drive is an IDE and not SATA hard drive (hence /dev/hdc)?

That's what I tried to do with strace. It stalled at something like
stat64("/dev/hda",
and hanged at it forever. But it shouldn't have been trying it in the first place...
Yes, it's an old laptop, circa 2003...

By the way, after an update, everything is back to normal again. So, it might have been a temporal glitch connected somehow to the very update procedure.

Thanks for your interest. It does seem like a strange problem.