Hello, After upgrade of lilo in unstable my whole SCSI disk got trashed. It could only be recovered with the use of the IBM drive fitness test tool, and a complete erase disk was necessary :-( What happened?
A reinstall of Woody showed that it can only boot from the MBR partition, not the root partition, i.e. boot=/dev/sda, works! boot=/dev/sda1, does not work! What has changed for newer versions of lilo? I have been running Debian stable/testing/unstable for several years now without any problems before. Note also that I have a dual disk system, SCSI and IDE, therefore the disk=, bios= statements in lilo.conf. The disk partitioning tools, such as cfdisk requires both the SCSI disk and the IDE disk to have at least one partition with the boot flag set. Is this really necessary? Does the install=menu stuff have anything to do with the crash? Maybe grub is better with respect to error recovery? Still a Debian fan, Svante ========================================== Partial session follows: .... Setting up lilo (22.3.2-3) ... Old /boot/boot.b symlink discovered, put the line "install=menu" in /etc/lilo.conf instead. Removing sym link Press ENTER to continue Running /usr/sbin/liloconfig LILO, the LInux LOader, sets up your system to boot Linux directly from your hard disk, without the need for a boot floppy. You already have a LILO configuration in the file /etc/lilo.conf Checking your /etc/lilo.conf for incompatible options... Install a boot block using your current LILO configuration? [Yes] ========================================================================== WARNING: Even if lilo runs successfully, see /usr/share/doc/lilo/INCOMPAT.gz for changes in the usage of the /etc/lilo.conf file. If needed: edit /etc/lilo.conf and rerun '/sbin/lilo -v' Running lilo... LILO version 22.3.2, Copyright (C) 1992-1998 Werner Almesberger Development beyond version 21 Copyright (C) 1999-2002 John Coffman Released 11-Jul-2002 and compiled at 11:04:56 on Aug 31 2002. Reading boot sector from /dev/sda1 Using MENU secondary loader Calling map_insert_data Boot image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.17 Added 2417smp1 * ... /boot/boot.0801 exists - no backup copy made. Writing boot sector. =========================================== Editing /etc/lilo.conf: boot=/dev/sda1 root=/dev/sda1 lba32 #compact #My changes below... install=menu #install=/boot/boot.b delay=20 map=/boot/map read-only disk=/dev/sda bios = 0x80 disk=/dev/hda bios = 0x81 prompt default=2417smp1 timeout=50 #image=/vmlinuz image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.17 label=2417smp1 read-only ========================================= lilo -v: LILO version 22.3.2, Copyright (C) 1992-1998 Werner Almesberger Development beyond version 21 Copyright (C) 1999-2002 John Coffman Released 11-Jul-2002 and compiled at 11:04:56 on Aug 31 2002. Reading boot sector from /dev/sda1 Using MENU secondary loader Calling map_insert_data Boot image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.17 Added 2417smp1 * /boot/boot.0801 exists - no backup copy made. Writing boot sector. ========================= reboot: ...