OK,
I am attempting to help a friend of mine install Slackware 9.0 on his Toshiba Pro440CDX laptop, and he is getting an error when booting from the bare.i boot floppy (CD boot is not possible).

He told me that the only message on his screen is 'LIL-' which I know is a LILO error, specifically from the LILO HOWTO:

LIL- The descriptor table is corrupt. This can either be caused by a geometry mismatch or by moving /boot/map without running the map installer.

Anyone else ever seen this during a slackware install? Any ideas on how to fix it? I'm assuming that the bare.i disk has a version of LILO on it to allow it to load up the bare.i kernel, but where do you go next? How do you fix a geometry mismatch?

slight

Are the floppy drive and cd drive connected to the laptop at the same time? For example on my Dell I can have the cd drive in the laptop while connecting the floppy thru a special cable to my parallel port. If they're both connected at the same time, use Smart Boot Manager. The disk image is in the rootdisks folder of the Slackware 9 CD. Use rawrite to burn the image to a floppy if using Windows.

Smart Boot Manager image: /rootdisks/sbootmgr.dsk

sbootmgr will allow you to boot from a cd even if the pc doesnt know how.

Nice.... I didn't even notice that existed.

OK...I'll let him know and see if we can get it working.
Thanks

slight

I just installed Slackware 9.0 on a Toshiba Satellite Pro 440 CDT. I had no problem booting from CDROM to install it. Is that model really different enough so as to make it impossible? On the model I was using, the CDROM drive rather than the floppy had to be in the internal drive bay. If it simply can't be booted from the CDROM, I would suggest at least trying the method hecresper pointed out. Then, if that fails, we can try some other suggestions.

Thanks for the suggestion. I told him to try the SBM, and he reported that he received a 'ERROR: Disk Error! 0xAA' when he did. He said he tried the disk in several other computers and they all worked fine, so its not the install media, it has to be something with the laptop. I think he has the CDRom in the drive bay, with the Floppy connected through a dongle plugged into one of the parralell ports. I'll confirm this with him. I can't find any other record of something like this happening. What other options are there? If the thing won't even boot off of a floppy, where do we go from here?

slight

If the floppy works OK in other computers, then it must be the floppy drive and/or the cable connecting it to the laptop.

Sounds like a hardware problem to me...

I was thinking hardware as well, but based on what he sent in his last E-mail, I am not sure:

As of right now, the floppy drive is what's dongled. I've never switched the two, because for some reason, I'm retard, and can't get them the pieces to physically switch. I've never had a problem with it before. Obviously, I can boot from the dongled floppy, cause it recognized and booted into the smartboot program. It just still wouldn't read the freaking CD from smartboot. I should point out that on ANY other PC I try, I can open the CDRom drive in windows and see files on that CD with the exception of this little laptop. Ever other CD I have up here will run just fine on the laptop, including other burned CDs. I don't have another bootable CD here (in my dorm room), I'd have to make a 1.5 hour drive home to grab them, and that's not happening til this weekend. However, I believe the problem is basically that the CDrom can't "see" the CD.

So the CDROM is in the drive bay, it will read any other CD, the Slackware CD that he burned is readable in other computers, but his laptop CDROM won't read it. We know the floppy will boot fine, because it ran the SBM program, but if he tries to boot the slack boot floppies it gives him the error that I first posted. I am at a loss.

I guess this is more of a hardware issue. I thought at first that the LILO error was related to slackware and maybe more common that I knew, but this certainly seems to be more hardware related. If an admin wants to move this to the hardware (or better yet, the Laptop) forum I am not against it.

slight

I do remember an error message coming up when using the SBM disk, but I ignored the message and it still allowed me to boot from the CD. Maybe he panic'ed too soon. Have him ignore the message and still go thru the process. I have not idea why the message comes up, tho.

OK.... do we not have a laptop forum anymore?
*scratches head and wonders when that happened*

slight

Got moved to a laptop and handheld fourm.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...?s=&forumid=25

=)

Nowell

Is your BIOS set to boot from cdrom ? Sounds like it isn't.
On a side note, don't laptops usually use SCSI drives requiring the *.s precompiled kernels ?

I have absolutly no experience with Linux on laptops and am kinda new to Linux in whole but I would try to take a look at the BIOS and see if it's set to boot from cdrom. If it is and it still doesn't work try copying the bare.s (or whatever the bare scsi equivalent kernel is called) in windows and boot from floppy.

It sounds like this is purely an issue with the CDROM drive not liking this particular CD. It's entirely possible that the laptop would boot correctly from a CD it could read correctly. If you could get a hold of another Slackware CD, this might solve the problem, but if the laptop cannot read the CD files correctly from Windows, then I don't see there being any way it will boot and install from the CD. Most laptops less than maybe seven or eight years old with an internal CDROM see it as an ATAPI device, including the Toshiba Satellite Pro 4xx series. I thought about it, and I don't think you can even hook the CDROM up with the external drive housing even though you can put the floppy in the internal bay with this model of laptop.

I believe that you can't boot off the cd-rom. I can't boot off my cd-rom either. Its not that the disc isn't readable or that the laptop can't read/boot off cd's. Its just something I can't explain. Anyways, I had to remove the hd from my laptop, connect it to my desktop (using a 2.5-3.5 converter) and installed it there then moved the hard drive back. I do get a few errors while I'm booting about certain modules that can't be loaded or with wrong parameters but everything works fine.

Really..... I didn't think that this was an option. When you say a 2.5 to a 3.5 converter, are you talking about a cable adapter? I'm a little ignorant when it comes to laptops, but I guess I just assumed that they used the same 40 pin/80 pin ATA cables that the larger drives used. I could see where things like netconfig would have to be run only after the drive has been moved back to the laptop. I am thinking that something like this would also be possible using ghost or a similar program, but I still think it would be easiest to just do a normal install if we can get it working.

Rodrin, I thought the same thing, and advised him to try doing a checksum and re-burning the CD again to see if he has any better luck. He told me that he has tried previous CDs that he has burned in the laptop and they work fine, but he might have been using better CDs where now he is just using crappy ones. Who knows. Unfortunately we live about 10 states away from eachother, or else I would go and take a look at the laptop myself. A friend of mine from way back who is pretty slick with puters is in his dorm, and he is going to check it out this weekend for him, so maybe he can get it working.

Thanks for all of the suggestions guys. Hope we can get it figured out.

slight

Is he using Slack current or 9.0? What happens if he for instance tries 8.0? Does that make a difference? And does your friend not know how to get to this forum himself?



-zsejk