Hello,

At the LILO prompt, when I select to boot Slackware, it displays "Loading Linux", but then goes back to the prompt. I'm able to use the Slackware CD to boot with "bare.i root=/dev/hdb5 noinitrd ro", to get into the installation.

At first people suggested I could have upgraded a kernel package and not rerun lilo, but I didn't do it recently, and even after running lilo (which installs successfully, with the warning "hdb5 is not on the first harddrive"), I still get the problem. Before this problem, I was using kernel 2.4.33 from -current; I downgraded to the 2.4.31 and 2.4.32 on Slackware 10.1 and 10.2 CD's, and ran lilo, but still had the problem.

I'm not sure what broke things. During the session before this started, my keyboard and mouse froze. This had happened occasionally before, even when I'm in Windows. I pressed the power button, which triggered the apm_proxy script to call "poweroff" to shutdown cleanly. After starting up, the problem occured. When I booted with CD and checked disk, it was clean. I had shutdown like this before and didn't have the problem.

I initially installed Slackware 10.1 from CD, and then used slapt-get to upgrade to 10.2, and later started using it to upgrade to -current packages. Today people told me I shouldn't do that, but it's the first time I had this problem while I started doing it weeks ago. After the last time I could boot, the "important"-looking packages I upgraded were

dhcp-3.0.4-i486-1
coreutils-5.96-i486-1
bin-11.0-i486-1

The last time I upgraded kernel before the problem was two months ago, and I had been able to boot after that.

Appreciate any suggestions!

are you installing lilo to the mbr, or to a boot partition? personally (not flaming here...) i've never had much success with lilo, and prefer grub...you might wanna give that a try. i install the bootloader to the mbr, and the files to the /boot on the partition where slackware lives...it's worked flawlessly for me...

Although i don't have personal experience, but have heard that sometimes slackware on hard drive other than primary, gives problem.
Just as hit n trial make this drive primary one and re-run lilo.

regards

That warning from lilo only means that it is likely that your BIOS always tries to boot your first drive (hda) before the others, probably not reaching to boot the bootloaded that you are installing at that second drive (hdb). Most BIOSes offer options to change this behavior.

About the other problem ....

hdb5 looks like a logical/extended partition, and according to what I learnt in the university and personal experiences: you cannot boot an OS directly from a logical partition. By directly I mean that you can not have an OS and make it boot with a bootloaded in that partition, but you have to pass control from a bootloader installed on a primary partition, in the same or in another hard disk... maybe the lilo warning was referring about that... don't know for sure.

What I understand perfectly is that when lilo displays "Loading Linux" and then goes back to the prompt means it can't find the OS, nor the bootloader chain, nor the files to load it.

I'm not sure how to address the problem directly, maybe you need to install lilo over hdb1, or just hdb (on the MBR outright), not the hdb5 logical partition.

hi,
install the bootloader into the MBR of primary drive (plz. correct me if i'm wrong).

lilo is there in hdb, if it would have been in hdb5, his system would not have booted to prompt.

regards

I am not very expert in this problem, but the root system is in hdb5? why? shouldn,t be hdb1? cause as someone already said here, hdb5 is a logical extended partition I imagine that you even didn,t marked it as bootable in cfdisk the main root partition always go in the first sector of the drive, could be hda , hdb, hdc whatever but in the first sector not the third one in this case hdb5 is the third one, why you didn,t put root in the first one hdb1?

Thanks for everyone's help! After I installed lilo to the Master Boot Record of the first drive, I can now boot from harddrive. Before I think I had it installed to the supreblock of the Linux root (would that mean hdb?).

I'm a little curious why this fixed it...but of course I'm happy to have it working again. Before fixing it, I also noticed that LILO did give an error message "0x01" when I tried to boot Linux. It flashed really quickly so I had to keep Enter pressed to see it (I tried that because someone told me they had the same problem and kept pressing Enter to get it to eventually boot ). In the lilo manual it says this stands for "invalid disk command". I was able to boot to Windows installed at hda1 even when I couldn't boot Linux.

Thanks again!

well, it's good to know that hagabaka's problem is now solved

that doesn't make sense at all third sector = hdb5 ??? where did you read that?

then you probably had an older lilo installed in the mbr,
giving you the prompt and wasn't able the find the kernel.

fwiw.:the mbr is the first sector of cilinder 0 of a harddisk,
the superblock of the first partition starts at cilinder 1.
( all partition have a superblock ).

egag

hi conrado,
hdb5 is a logical partition. In earlier days of operating system it was mandatory to put the root system into the primary partitions. But now days you can run it (talking about linux and not windows) from any logical partition. Be it hdb5 or hdb6.....hdb9......and so on.
But if its windows, it require the 1st primary partition of the hard drive.

The 1st 64 sectors, from 0 to 63, are for MBR. You even can't see that partition.
You assumed hdb5 to be third one b'coz probably you checked it in you systems configuration, and there you are having it as the 3rd one.

Actually we could have the following combinations:
4 primary + 0 extended
hda1, hda2, hda3, hda4 (no logical since we don't have extended, as logical can't exist without extended)

3 primary + 1 extended
hda1, hda2, hda3, hda4(its extended), hda5...and so on will be logical.

2 primary + 1 extended ( you can't have more than 1 extended)
hda1 and hda2 as primary, hda3 extended, no hda4 in this case.....hda5 onwards as logical.

1 primary + 1 exteded
hda1 as primary, hda2 as extended and then hda5 onwards as logical (no hda3 or hda4 in this case).

So considering the last case, you are assuming the hda5 to be the third one. Right ???

regards

-------------
The 1st 64 sectors, from 0 to 63, are for MBR.
-------------

there are only 63 sectors.
...and the mbr is the first ( one).

for info on mbr & partition table, here's a good link :
http://www.geocities.com/thestarman3..._in_detail.htm

egag